Short answer. Yes. As the owner of the dominant estate benefiting from a permanent right of way, you are the one who must make the necessary repairs to keep it usable. You also owe the servient estate's owner a proportionate share of the taxes on the land the right of way crosses.
What the law says
If the right of way is permanent, the necessary repairs shall be made by the owner of the dominant estate. A proportionate share of the taxes shall be reimbursed by said owner to the proprietor of the servient estate.
Civil Code, Article 654 — Repairs and Taxes. Read the full provision →
The dominant estate's owner handles repairs
Article 654 applies specifically where the right of way is permanent, and it places the duty to make necessary repairs squarely on the owner of the dominant estate — that is, you, as the one benefiting from the passage across your neighbor's land. The servient landowner, whose property the path crosses, is not the one obligated to keep it in repair.
You also owe a share of the taxes
Beyond repairs, the article adds a second obligation: you must reimburse the servient estate's owner for a proportionate share of the taxes on the land your right of way occupies. This reflects that the servient owner is still paying taxes on land they cannot freely use because part of it is committed to your passage, and the law does not let that cost sit with them alone.
Why permanence changes the allocation
The article's focus on a permanent right of way is deliberate. A right of way meant to last indefinitely creates an ongoing burden on the servient land that the dominant owner is expected to actively maintain, rather than treating upkeep as the servient owner's problem simply because it is their soil. Putting maintenance and tax-sharing on the party who benefits keeps the arrangement fair over the long run. Article 654's repair and tax obligations are distinct from the one-time cost of creating the right of way in the first place. Article 649 requires the dominant owner to pay proper indemnity to the servient owner when the easement is established, and for a permanent passage specifically, that indemnity covers the value of the land occupied plus the damage caused to the servient estate. Article 654 does not replace that upfront indemnity — it adds an ongoing duty to repair and share taxes once the permanent right of way already exists.
What the article leaves open
Article 654 does not specify what counts as a necessary repair, how the proportionate tax share is to be calculated, or how disputes over either obligation are to be resolved. Those are practical questions that would need to be worked out between the two landowners, or by whatever agreement originally established the right of way, rather than being answered by this article alone, and disagreements over either point are fairly common in real-world practice.