This is the history of the first attempt of Arianna Solare to claim a 50 acre parcel of Great Southwestern Land in 2004. It is referenced from the actual court documents along with coverage by the Taos News and a few other documents. I am going to follow the suit brief by brief and hearing by hearing. As I was there at the time and an active participant in the opposition, I am going to mix in what I experienced on the ground in the community as the court case progressed.

Background Information.

In the late 1990s, the Taos County assessor’s office reassessed a large number of lots whose owner could not be contacted to the original developer, the Great Southwestern Land Co. Before that, these lots were not listed at all for a number of years in the assessor’s office. Before that they were in some cases assessed to other owners. The most common one was the Cayman International Corporation. In the case of the property that was claimed in the Solare Vs Great Southwestern suit, the reassessment was correct and the lots were Great Southwestern lots that had never been sold. The Great Southwestern Land Co had not existed in any functional capacity since the mid 1970s and its corporate certification was revoked in 1979 so it was clearly a defunct corporation by then. The reassessment, as far as I can determine, was done to create a tax bill for these lots so they could eventually be sold at tax auction. Many owners of adjacent properties started to pay taxes on them to prevent them from being auctioned and a few of them included the Great Southwestern lots in quiet title suits of all their properties and these suits succeeded in spite of a lack of the legal requirement of color of title on the Great Southwestern lots. This was simply because no one cared enough to object in court. Great Southwestern was long gone and nobody in the community objected to someone claiming a few lots bordering the lots they already owned.

Arianna Solare was a recent arrival in the area at the time and had been buying lots and reselling them for profit starting around 2003. A Taos county assessors office printout of lots where she is the grantee dated October 10, 2004 has 19 lots in total that she purchased. A printout of lots where she transferred the property as a grantor of the same date lists 10 in total. I have some flyers she posted at time with lots for sale. One is for a 1/2 acre two lot parcel that she was asking $3400 for which is quite a bit higher than actual market value at the time.

The Solare Vs Great Southwestern Land Co. Quiet Title Suit.

On May 26, 2004, Ariana Solare filed a quiet title suit on 237 lots mostly Great Southwestern but also including a few she had purchased. amounting to 59.25 acres in total. The Great Southwestern land was two large contiguous sections of unit 3 of Carson Estates that was four lots wide with a road in between and almost a mile in length. Her attorney was Samuel Herrera. She also moved her school bus to a location near the center of the land she was attempting to claim and started building a house right in the middle of the road between adjacent lots near to where the school bus was parked. She lived in the school bus at the time.

This, of course, did not go unnoticed by the surrounding community at the time and we at first attempted to negotiate with her and dissuade her from pursuing her suit. I personally met with her to discuss it with one of my neighbors. She had no intention of doing that and the discussions got heated soon thereafter. At the time, she was young, attractive and very charismatic. She did have supporters in the community, mostly male, who in some way, were snake charmed by her and defended her actions out of some misplaced sense of personal friendship and loyalty. As I remember the experience of her charisma, it was a sort of contact high that made you feel she was a nice person. That impression lasted just a few hours with me but made a deeper impression in others. Women were mostly immune to it. Some of the divisions in the community she created at the time lingered for years afterwards. Those of us who opposed it started organizing and making both Tres Orejas and the greater Taos community aware of what was going on.

On June 10, 2004, attorney Samuel Herrara filed an application to withdraw as her attorney just two weeks after the suit was filed. The reason given in the application is, “Plaintiff and her counsel have a difference of opinion as the merits of her claim. This dispute can not be resolved” This was granted by the court and on July 9th, 2004, Todd Lazar became her attorney of record with the court. She also amended the property in the suit to include exclusively Great South Western lots, 209 in total amounting to 52.25 acres.

On the ground in Tres Orejas, things had gotten a lot more heated with Solare filing a restraining order against one of her critics and divisions between her supporters and opponents growing. Faced with the inevitable, a group of her opponents got together and pooled money to hire an attorney. Carol Neelley was hired as their attorney and she filed a motion to intervene in the suit on August 9, 2004. On September 3, 2004, Todd Lazar filed a brief in opposition to the intervention on the grounds that the neighbors had no legal standing to intervene in the case as they had no opposing claims to the property. On October 12, 2004, a hearing was held with judge Peggy Nelson and the motion to intervene was allowed to proceed. Judge Nelson is quoted in the Taos News as saying “There is an appearance of sham or fraud and I will allow this intervention”. The Taos News article also states that she advised attorney Todd Lazar, “Be prepared to show proof of the chain of title to the land when future hearings are held”. A motion for declaratory judgment was filed by Carol Neelley on October 15, 2004 seeking a court declaration that stated that Solare had no legal basis to claim title. This was followed by a bizarre filing by Solare herself on October 28, 2004. It is four pages long and is essentially a plea to emotion. In it she admits indirectly that she had no valid claim to title, stating, “I have taken sole responsibility for the land in question in my case, holding as strong a title as one can hold in this type of situation”. She then proceeds to personal attacks against some of her opponents. It ends with her claiming to occupy the land “lovingly” and stating that she holds the “strongest title available” and that her suit was a “legitimate legal process”. In a filing dated November 15, 2004, Todd Lazar withdrew the suit “without prejudice”. I don’t see any indication in my files that this was accepted by the court and the motion for declaratory judgment filed by Carol Neelley prevailed. Solare went to Thailand that winter even though a hearing was scheduled in her case and on February 28, 2005 a final judgment by default filed with the court that states that “Solare does not have any legal basis for title to the property described in exhibit A”. This default judgment is the one Solare’s current attorneys have made two attempts to overturn. After reading it along with all the other court filings in the case I can see why. It is by far the strongest ruling against her. If Todd Lazar’s dismissal of the case was the end of it, she could have simply refiled at any time for all the lots in the suit but this declaratory judgment states quite simply that she has no legal basis to claim these lots. And, as I have previously said, it precludes her under the first ruling in the current case from claiming the whole 50 plus acres of Great Southwestern land and limits her to what she might claim through adverse possession. She has several other requirements to fulfill to claim adverse possession and both the documents she has filed for “color of title” and the tax records are flawed. Her current attorneys have done their best to sidetrack the case and avoid what was referred to at the most recent hearing as an “evidentiary hearing” where her documents will be examined and challenged in court. That in itself says a lot.

In conclusion after reviewing the court case, there was absolutely no chance if it succeeding once the intervention was allowed to proceed and she was required to show a chain of title as proof of ownership which she didn’t have. If she did, the property would have been assessed to her without any quiet title suit required. Apart from this, the county government at the time was clearly in favor of the intervention from the Taos News report. Solare’s position was that filing a quiet title suit on land that she had no valid claim of title to was a perfectly legitimate way of acquiring property. I believe that she received a lecture from judge Peggy Nelson that this was not how the law worked but I have no record of this in my files. The current case, even with all of its procedural twisting by Solare’s current attorney’s, still runs a parallel course to the first in many ways. Among the documents I’ve acquired since 2004 is a response to a settlement offer made to the intervenors in August of 2004. The offer was to let her proceed with the suit and she would give half the land to the community. I knew nothing about this at the time but I do know of several settlement offers that have been made in the current case and they are all very similar to this one. Solare’s attorneys both then and now have argued both then and now that the community has no legal standing to intervene in the case even though it will affect the community as a whole both directly in what happens to the land in question and indirectly through the legal precedent it would set for all the rest of the Great Southwestern land in Carson Estates. It is, in fact, the very existence of a community that gives the land its value and makes it attractive to speculators. Without the people who, starting in the late 1970s, built homes on it, it would not have the value it has in 2025. Tres Orejas has a reputation of being one of the nicer places to live on what is referred to locally as “the mesa”. That reputation comes directly from the people who live there and make it their home. Another reoccurring theme is Solare attempting to portray herself as the victim when, in fact, she is clearly not and has been attempting an unscrupulous land grab at the expense of the surrounding community. She has accused those who oppose her of harassment and both in 2004 and 2024 sought restraining orders against some of her more vocal opponents.

In writing and researching this, I’ve corrected several errors I’ve made previously writing mostly from memory. The unsold Great Southwestern lots in her first suit amount to 52.25 acres and the amount in the second suit is 59.75. Somehow I remembered this as 65 acres. I’ve also been misspelling Solare’s first name. It is Arianna in the court documents, not Ariana.

For those of you unfamiliar with New Mexico real estate law, this is what color of title is. Color of title is a deed or other instrument of title such as a will that is false, incorrect or defective. Usually it is from a grantor who had no real claim to title or has an incorrect property description and refers to the wrong property. New Mexico law on adverse possession requires “color of title obtained in good faith” to claim a property through adverse possession. Good faith means an honest mistake, not a deliberately falsified document.

The case number of this case is CV 2004-191. The Taos News article I refer to is from the Taos News October 14-20 2004.