legal shenanigans

Linda Gallegos, the Sandoval County Assessor is represented by three tax-payer funded lawyers, trying desperately to maintain the county's unjust unconstitutional enrichment scheme.  Perhaps they are afraid of whom else may decide to really dive into their taxes.  I've only looked at my community.  Sandoval County has executed an assault of frivolous legal actions upon us in order to attempt to avoid a review of our appeal on the merits.  They have complained about scandalous language, font size, line spacing, page numbering and missing signatures and follow this up with an illegal cross-appeal and delaying tactics - oh and they never served the record to us as required by law - nice guys - all paid for by MY OWN TAX DOLLARS.

Here are the legal filings so far.  Keep in mind that in a 'normal' appeal there should be very little back-and-forth....perhaps 6 events.  The specific documents are in the table after my coloured commentary of events

March 7 - Another hearing request filed.  This one was filed as a pretrial conference.  How can there be a pretrial conference with no 'trial' set?  Obviously another delay attempt by the county

December 18 - Our completion of briefing got filed today - it rolls up our initial motion to enforce the rules and disregard the hearing request and the county's response into a motion packet - motion packets are a requirement of LR13-118.

December 14 - The county responded with their opposition to our motion to enforce the rules - claiming there are no rules to violate!

December 5 - Our response to the request for hearing is that it is untimely and improper since it requests hearings on matters they themselves have already told the court require no hearing.  We consider this a significant enough violation of the rules that we requested the court to apply the sterner disciplinary rules available to the court.

December 1 - No suprise the county's lawyer filed an opposition to our motion to dismiss - this one came by us mail though, not email.  And he included a bonus move - a request for a hearing.  Unfortunately appeal rules don't permit them to submit a standalone request for hearing after my completion of briefing was filed - and LR13-122 that doesn't allow them to change their completions of briefings after the fact - all issues they want to talk about had already completed briefing and their request for hearing was required to be submitted at the time they completed briefing.

November 22 - Due to the professional county lawyer's failure to abide by the basic rule for serving documents we have asked that everything filed on November 17 be dismissed.  We have followed that back to the beginning and have asked to court to determine whether everything they've filed with us is improperly served and hence invalid.  We also pointed out their lack of candor in the text of their motions - this one is worth a read imo.

November 17 - was a very busy day.  It is 31 days after we filed our statement of the issues so we filed our completion of briefing, telling the court the appeal is ripe for review, without the response from the Assessor.  And BOOM!  The county filed three things.  First they filed their completion of briefings for the motion to strike our statement, as well as for more time and then they filed an objection to our completion of briefing.  Color:  Regarding our opposition to their request for more time, they used the 'not my fault' excuse - blaming the failure to produce the record on time on the state - LOL weak.  On the opposition to our completion of briefing, they basically said 'just because....' and provided no justification.  As to their response on our opposition to striking our statement, they said that 'we arent allowed to file electronically' and here's the money quote 'There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally'.  FFS

November 10 - We have filed our opposition to both the motion for more time and the motion to strike our statement of the issues.  Both of these are simply frivolous wastes of time by our tax dollars.

October 26 - Another busy day for the county.  They requested more time, a total of about 75 days to respond to our statement of the issues - because they are travelling and are busy - FFS!  They also filed another meritless motion to strike, this time against our statement of the issues, claiming it was hard to read, did not follow a law that only applies to hard copy filings (we always file electronically), and expressed incoherently that our statement of the issues was scandalous.

October 19 - We filed our completion of briefing on the motion to dismiss the cross appeal

October 17 - We filed our statement of the issues, which set the clock running - they have 30 days (nov 16) to file their reply.  Also, they responded to our opposition to their writ - by requesting more time and a chance to fix the shortcomings we had pointed out to them

October 16 - 36 days after we filed, the lawyers had not produced the record to us.  And when we retrieved the record from the state, turns out they only included half of our evidence.  We pointed out both failings.  In response on October 17th they 'let us' set the clock to October 16th which is when the state sent an updated version of the record to the court.  Our main appeal, the statement of the issues had been ready for days, just waiting to link it to the record

October 11 - We pointed out how their petition for a writ of certiorari was logically incontinent and asked for it to be denied by the court.

October 4 - They were busy.  They provided meritless arguments as to why they should be allowed to cross appeal with a filing I describe as logically incontinent.  And just to be safe they also filed a petition for a writ of certiorari which is a extraordinary request to the court on constitutional grounds to review a decision.  The actual petition was a joke, no detail whatsoever AND requested they be allowed to appeal - which they can't have because the text of the law is clear....more logical incontinence.

September 26 - The lawyer filed a claim to cross appeal. The text of the law allows only property owners to appeal so that led to our motion to dismiss on October 2