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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Mineral Rights Worth $3.8M
By Phil Parker
Journal Staff Writer
The long legal battle over the value of mineral rights in the Valles Caldera National Preserve may be nearly over. A federal judge has ruled the rights, mainly for geothermal energy production, are worth $3.8 million — more than the $1.8 million the Forest Service had first offered the then-owners, but substantially less than the $14 million former owners claimed they were due when the issue went to court in 2008.
Along with establishing the new appraisal price, the judge's opinion and order decrees that the plaintiff in the case, the United States government, must pay the defendants, including J.B. Harrell Jr., $50,000 to compensate for legal costs incurred when the government failed to disclose appraised values involved in the transfer of part of the ranch land that later became the preserve to Santa Clara Pueblo.
In 2000, the government bought the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera and 87 percent of the mineral rights from ranchers for $101 million to establish the preserve. A later act of Congress led the federal government to condemn the remaining mineral rights on the land.
The owners of those rights had flirted over the past decade with establishing a geothermal energy plant in the southwest section of the preserve, where wells had been dug on what had been private land before the Valles Caldera became a preserve. But the effort was halted by federal attorneys, who filed the condemnation lawsuit and took the mineral rights in 2006.
The government has been on the hook to compensate the mineral rights owners since that ruling, but a price couldn't be agreed on.
The recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Brack may settle the matter. Brack's order, filed recently in federal court in Albuquerque, includes summaries of numerous appraisals made over the years in the Valles Caldera.
On the basis of these figures as well as other information, Brack found the Forest Service appraisal of $1.8 million to be too low. But he also noted that the landowners and energy companies involved in the case had not, in the course of most of a decade, taken any practical steps toward making geothermal energy production on the Valles Caldera a reality. Moreover, he noted, only modest energy production from geothermal sources on the preserve was likely to be possible, and at any rate was not at the moment commercially viable. Brack said the mineral rights owners' appraisals and others, which valued the rights somewhere between $14 million and $29 million, were unrealistic.
Representatives of the Harrell family and the various energy companies could not be reached for comment late Monday.
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