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::: COMMUNITY NEWS RMA board accepts 'final, final' development agreement to settle 1990s lawsuit
In January, the board approved the MBA -- setting the terms for the final build-out of the community -- but the version it received back from the PTF 10 days ago was not what it had approved. The new document contained 421 changes, including 191 deletions and 184 insertions. The changes were described as substantial and unacceptable by RMA officials. After a three-hour meeting Feb. 24 with PTF representatives and RMA counsel, Schieberl said the terms approved by the board in January had been restored to the document. However, the version of the agreement the lawyers produced for a follow-up meeting didn’t reflect the accord reached by their clients. “I’ve been talking with David Howard (a senior vice president with the McMorgan & Co. investment management firm in San Francisco) on a regular basis for the last week," Schieberl said Monday evening. "Whenever we’ve had an outstanding issue … we’ve talked directly on the phone. We’d resolve that issue and I’d check with various members of the board, which I did all last weekend and I did all this weekend. And I took their concerns to David Howard and we came to a mutual agreeable solution to those issues and they became part of what is now memorialized in the MBA. And some of the things were just taking the legalese out and putting it into language everybody could understand.” Although a court date set for last Thursday was said to have been canceled because of problems with the document, Schieberl said Monday that the PTF and RMA notified the judge last Thursday that they had reached agreement. The settlement becomes official when the judge signs the stipulation of agreement between the two parties, which Schieberl said he expects will happen within the next few days. At that point, the MBA will be a public document, he said. “I believe that we did our fiduciary duty to the corporation and to the people of Rancho Murieta,” Schieberl said. “I’m very proud of this board and the fact that they have done due diligence.” He said he believes that by taking this action, the board had “mitigated the impacts” of an inevitable build-out of the community. The MBA was reached after nearly three years of negotiations between the RMA board and the Murieta Holdings developers, representing the PTF. It becomes an addendum to the Letter Agreement, the tentative settlement of a lawsuit stemming from the financial collapse of developer Jack Anderson a decade ago. Although the MBA started out simply as a development agreement, the board voted in January to approve the document as the final settlement of the lawsuit with the PTF. At a meeting of the community’s Joint Security Committee on Tuesday, Community Services District President Wayne Kuntz expressed concern about how the final version of the MBA may affect CSD efforts to move the relocation of the North Gate forward. According to the terms of the MBA, the sale of the Retreat properties and the Residences of Murieta Hills property to subdividers will trigger the financing for the North Gate redesign. The PTF would deposit $1.4 million in an escrow account to fund the project when the properties (or 333 units) are sold. But since the CSD is no longer included in the MBA, CSD officials fear the district no longer has the backing to continue to take the lead in the gate project. According to Schieberl, the CSD “will be able to involve themselves in the process.” He said the RMA negotiated a new exhibit in the final MBA that “talks about the stages of the design process and who’s involved in them.” The new exhibit, a three-page document, places responsibility for the functional aspects of the new gate -- traffic lanes and gate location -- with the RMA, Schieberl said. As Schieberl sees it, the CSD "was always essentially working through the RMA” and “we negotiated (with the PTF) on their behalf.” He said the new exhibit defines the responsibilities of the RMA and the PTF with regard to the gate. “(The CSD was) interested in the function of the gate. All that’s now the responsibility of the RMA to present to the PTF. (The PTF’s) responsibility is to incorporate it into the gate,” he explained. As of Tuesday morning, the CSD hadn't seen the final document. Another CSD concern has been the funding trigger. Because of delays in getting the proposed development started, the CSD has been reluctant to rely on the developers’ timetable for starting a project the CSD believes the community needs now for safety and security reasons. Schieberl said he expects that the subdividers will purchase the properties soon, even though the maps for the projects are still in the county planning process, and thus trigger the funding mechanism. “I don’t anticipate this being too much farther down the road,” he said Monday. The goal of the joint CSD/RMA gate committee is to have the new North Gate in place by summer of 2004.
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