Mariposa owners faced with conflicting views

RIO RANCHO — A High Desert Investment Corp. board member says it would have made no sense for the company to “push” for a general obligation form of assessment from Mariposa property owners — which is now exposing them to potentially high taxes — as an attorney claimed at a meeting in late September.

Public Improvement District Board attorney Peter Franklin, who helped set up the Mariposa PID, told concerned property owners at a meeting Sept. 26 that High Desert insisted on the general obligation structure for calculating property owners’ tax obligations toward $16 million in bonds. As a result of this structure, unique to all other public improvement districts in the state, Mariposa property owners now face a 37 percent increase in PID payments this year.

“That was something the developer pushed for hard and said, ‘It won’t be a problem, we’ll always be around,’” Franklin said at the meeting.

High Desert board member Gary Gordon was not at the meeting in 2006 where the company negotiated the terms of the bond issuance, but he said while the company had every intention of staying with the Mariposa project to the end, they wouldn’t have made that claim at the beginning.

“We wouldn’t say things like, ‘We’re going to be here forever,’” Gordon told the Journal last week. “Not because we didn’t think that, but because careful businessmen don’t say these things.”

Gordon said he’s concerned about the “blame game” that has emerged since High Desert announced in June that it was pulling out of the Mariposa project, and would not honor its commitment to help cover any shortfall in tax revenue needed to repay the $16 million in bonds used for a water management system and other Mariposa infrastructure.

He said that in 2006, the beginning of the housing bubble that burst in 2008, the company calculated that any shortfall between owners’ payments and bondholders’ expectations would be negligible, so had the company and bondholders known the shortfall would have been so large, they both would have walked away from the table.

“Obviously High Desert would have said, ‘No,’ and of course the bondholders would have said, ‘No way,’” he said.