Judge Holds Off Trinitas Bank Seizure

Golf goes on as foreclosure sale put off until 2012
By Dana M. Nichols
Record Staff Writer
December 08, 2011 12:00 AM

MODESTO – It appears that golf will continue until at least Jan. 27 at the troubled Trinitas golf course near Wallace, after a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge Wednesday denied a bank’s request to seize the property and sell it at auction.

Community Bank of San Joaquin had asked Judge Ronald Sargis to lift a stay that has been in place to prevent the foreclosure auction since 2009, when Trinitas owners Michael and Michelle Nemee filed for bankruptcy after the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors twice voted against measures that would have granted Trinitas legal status.

The golf course on 280 acres along Ospital Road was built in an agricultural preserve without permits. Sargis ruled in a recent trial that golf is not a legal form of agritourism in Calaveras County, and thus the county can enforce zoning codes banning golf there.

Sargis said Wednesday he would sign that judgment, which requires the Nemees to halt the golf operation by Jan. 27.

Dennis Hauser, an attorney representing Community Bank of San Joaquin, noted that once golf stops, so, too, will the source of income the Nemees are presumably using to make partial payments to the bank. Hauser told Sargis that makes it urgent to allow the bank to finish the foreclosure auction to reduce its losses.

“This is a very small one-branch bank,” Hauser said. “This is its largest loan,” he said of the more than $2.4 million the bank has lent the Nemees.

Hauser said the bank “is being crucified” by being unable to collect more than partial payments on what is owed.

Sargis was not entirely sympathetic and pointed out that the bank played a role in constructing an illegal golf course.

“Everybody knew what was being built out there was not in compliance with the zoning,” Sargis told Hauser.

Sargis did promise to modify the stay so that by Jan. 18, Community Bank of San Joaquin could begin the formal notices required to hold a foreclosure auction. Those notices take about three weeks, Hauser said.

Sargis said that will make it possible for him to reconsider the bank’s request for a foreclosure auction on Jan. 25, by which time he said he expects he will know if the Nemees plan to appeal their loss in the agritourism case and whether the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal will accept the case.

If that case goes to an appeal hearing, it could allow the Nemees to continue the Trinitas golf operation beyond the Jan. 27 stop date in Sargis’ ruling.

The basic bankruptcy proceeding and the agritourism suit are just part of a maze of legal actions surrounding Trinitas. Also Wednesday the bankruptcy court held an initial status conference on a more recent lawsuit the Nemees filed in which they argue county officials violated their constitutional rights by denying the golf course.

Sargis scheduled the next status conference on that suit for Feb. 22 after attorney Ken Foley of San Andreas, who filed the civil rights suit for the Nemees, failed to appear for Wednesday’s conference.

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 607-1361 or dnichols@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/calaverasblog.