This is an overdue update on both the upcoming bench trial in the Solare/Golden River quiet title suit in unit 3 and the Tres Orejas Neighborhood Association meetings we’ve held recently. Last week, the Tres Orejas Neighborhood filed a friends of the court brief in the suit. I authored the text and used information about Solare’s real estate transactions that I obtained from the Taos County Clerk’s office in 2004 in part of it.

There was a pretrial conference yesterday and the friends of the court brief was brought up. I knew it was, legally, a shot in the dark and like many other shots in the dark it didn’t quite hit its mark but the richocet did have some impact. The brief came up towards the end of the hearing. I noticed that Solare’s attorny had a rather sour look on his face when he brought it up. He complained about not being notified about it. That’s because we filed it in person at the courthouse while the attorneys are all filing electronically. He, of course, brought up procedural issues about it and the other attorney didn’t object. The judge brought up a copy and read the title but pledged not to read the rest of it. Solare’s attorney looked noticeably relieved at that. He had obviously read the whole thing. He made a formal motion to strike it but that wasn’t done so it sits unread by the judge in the court files. Just because the judge feels he shouldn’t read it doesn’t mean the rest of you can’t so here it is followed by my commentary on it.

TONA Friends of the Court Brief

The first short paragraph states the main community issue of a favorable judgment encouraging more land grabs and squatting on Great Southwestern lots. It follows with some of what I put in the history of the first land grab attempt in 2004 about Solare actively buying and selling lots in Unit 3 at the time and owning multiple lots she could have legally built on and that squatting on Great Southwester land and building on it was a choice she made. The third paragraph is what likely really annoyed Solare’s attorney. I basically made a counter argument to the multiple arguments he and Solare’s previous attorney made about legal standing in the two suits and stated that this is not a normal quiet title suit, it’s an attempt to use the legal system to gain ownership of abandoned property that could be considered fraudulent. In such a case, the community in whole or in part has the right to intervene. In the case of Solare, given her past real estate and community history, her gaining title to that land would have a negative impact both on the immediate neighbors and the community as a whole. Solare’s attorney brought up the TONA president’s previous quiet title suit that included GSW lots when he talked about the brief. I have to say that her suit and all the previous suits that included GSW lots were by homeowners who included adjacent GSW lots to their property and were taking control of abandoned land around their homes and making space between themselves and their neighbors. No one in the community had any objections to this and it wasn’t opposed in court. In Solare’s case, it’s a naked land grab of the largest and most valuable piece of real estate in our community by someone who has a long history of flipping real estate for profit in this community. This is why there’s been community intervention in her two quiet title suits while others have gone through the court system without objection. The final paragraph briefly states another community issue and points out that she built her house on a platted easement road and even if she wins and gets title to some of the land around her house, access to the road has to be restored.

In writing the court brief, I am not, obviously, an attorney. What I am is a community advocate and the court brief has to be considered a political statement as much as anything. The response to it from people in the community has been very favorable. It attempts to bring to the attention of the court community issues that have been deliberately side stepped by Solare’s attorney. Unfortunately, our adversarial legal system requires an adversary to function properly. When the adversary is a long dead corporation that wasn’t much more than a corporate alias when it did function, the legal system breaks down and is subject to abuse.

The bench trial itself will take place at Taos District Court on November 5th and 6 starting at 9am. I will be there in person and encourage others to attend. The community issues of the case can also be shown by just the number of interested people who show up even if the judge won’t read the brief about them. There is a hearing on two motions in the case this coming Monday October 27 at 10am.

We had a TONA board meeting a few hours after the court hearing. We did talk about the court brief and the reaction to it in court but we also worked on draft bylaws, discussed the ongoing Sky Cafe cleanup and the first thing we talked about is that the Blue Bus line to Carson is going to have bus stops in Tres Orejas, one at Flag rd and one at Sunset Bvld. This is going to start in November. In the bylaws discussion we are considering lowering the annual dues to $10. These dues are intended to cover our basic administrative expenses like corporate fees. We are talking about holding fundraising events to cover more ambitious goals. In our talks about the overall green land situation of which the Solare case is part of, we are talking about documenting all of the green land in units 2 and 3 and the association paying property taxes on some of it and somehow taking control of it. The overall vision is that the large amount abandoned property in our community needs to be dealt with in an orderly way with the consent of the community and not just have chunks of it grabbed by random speculators and unscrupulous attorneys. It’s obvious that a lot of people are taking matters in their own hands and paying the taxes on lots adjacent or near them and some of them have included those lots in quiet title suits on their properties. The de facto standard is that if it’s next to your property and you already possess it and pay the taxes on it, no one is going to go to the trouble and expense of objecting to it in court.

I will be posting the minutes of the September 22nd and October 7th TONA meetings on the TONA page of this website. We are holding board meeting about every 2 weeks right now and the next one will be on October 30th at 5pm at Ruth Fahrbach’s house.