The second half of the sentence is the sharper one

“or after reacquisition of the property by the creator of the easement or servitude.”

Reacquisition is an ordinary event in a community's life, and it was a quiet hazard. A developer who takes back an unsold lot. An association that acquires a lot — by foreclosure of its own assessment lien, by deed in lieu, by purchase to control a problem parcel. In each case the association or developer briefly owns both sides of an easement it created or benefits from, and at common law the easement could be extinguished by that union without anyone intending it or noticing.

The section now says it survives. That is worth knowing on the day an association takes title to a unit, which is when nobody is thinking about the drainage easement running under it.

What it does not do

It validates easements created by an owner, which is the developer-or-association case. It is not a general abolition of merger, and it does not revive an easement already extinguished before July 1, 2025 — the Act carries no retroactivity clause, and the default effective date under SDCL 2-14-16 applies.

It also does not answer whether an easement is enforceable in substance. It removes one defence — that common ownership killed it — and leaves every other question where it was: scope, abandonment, misuse, and whether the instrument describes what it purports to describe.

Read it against the access cases

South Dakota's courts have been busy on easements in exactly the settings this section serves.

In Turgeon v. City of Spearfish, 2026 S.D. 22, a reversionary clause in a 1953 easement was treated as evidence of an intent not to dedicate — the court quoting the rule that “a reservation of the right to revoke defeats the dedication.” In Luzier v. Hemmah, 2026 S.D. 30, decades of encroachment in a 1925 lakefront subdivision produced prescriptive easements limited to the footprint of the garages and nothing wider.

The common thread is that in South Dakota subdivisions, access and drainage rights are frequently governed by old instruments whose validity is contestable. SB 215 removes one of the contests.

What this means practically

Easements in the original plat and declaration package are materially more likely to hold. That is the whole point of the section, and it favours associations, because those instruments are what give the association the right to cross lots to maintain what it maintains.

Title work should stop flagging the merger objection for post-2025 creations. Where a title opinion previously noted a merger risk on a developer-created easement, the statute now answers it.

An association acquiring a lot has one less thing to lose by accident. Our collections and liens page covers the circumstances in which that acquisition happens, and water and drainage covers what those easements typically carry.

What to watch next

The phrase “created by an owner” has not been construed. Whether it covers an easement created by a predecessor in title whose successor now holds both sides — the association that acquires from a developer who created the easement — is the first question a court will face, and the section's words do not obviously answer it.