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Old Land Feud Shuts Families Out of Homes

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Times Staff Writer

For the last 18 years, Raul and Linda Zendejas have lived in one or the other of two high-ceilinged farmhouses that stand along Old San Pasqual Road.

Only in recent months has bureaucracy caught up with them and labeled the two houses where they have raised their seven children as substandard; their water well contaminated.

Last week, a San Diego City Council committee ordered the city attorney to evict the Zendejas family and their neighbors, the Jesus Fonsecas, in the farmstead to the east. After the families are gone, the city will “abate” the old structures, which in plain English means to tear them down.

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The City of San Diego, which owns 32,000 acres of the San Pasqual Valley and about 40 houses including the Zendejas and Fonseca homes, appears to be the villain in the families’ travails, but city officials claim that they are powerless to do anything for the families. The Zendejases and Fonsecas have been caught in the middle of a longstanding feud between their employer, Frank Konyn, and their landlord, TMY Farms Inc., which holds the city lease on the houses and land on which they live, city officials say.

“It’s the craziest deal I’ve ever come up against,” San Diego City Councilman Bill Cleator stormed last week. “They’ve been acting like the Martins and McCoys,” he said of Konyn and TMY Manager Mike Horwath.

Horwath and Konyn, both admittedly stubborn men, have been at odds since long before 1978, when TMY Farms outbid Konyn for the lease on the land where the dairy workers’ houses stand.

A lawyer involved in one of several legal battles being waged by the two men commented that “the legal fees those guys have paid would fix up every house and well in the valley. They just love a good fight.”

In December, the City of San Diego ordered the power shut off to the well that supplied water to the Zendejas and Fonseca families. That cut off running water in the two homes.

After that, life was not easy for Linda Zendejas. Removing the playtime grime from 5-year-old Jaime’s elbows and knees became a chore, and keeping the 6-year-old twins’ frilled pinafores white and bright was a task that required hauling buckets of water to the modern washer on the closed-in side porch.

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The city supplied a tank of potable water for the households during the long drought but the two families spurned the gesture and hauled in their own supplies and stocked bottled water for drinking and cooking.

“It has not been so bad,” Linda Zendejas said through an interpreter, her eldest son, 18-year-old Raul. “They all help me,” she said with a gesture toward her brood.

Despite the hardship, the Zendejas’ lawn is lush and green, the geraniums that fringe the front porch are blooming. Raul Zendejas Jr. explained that three weeks ago his father’s boss, dairyman Konyn, had repaired and reactivated another well on the property and had restored running water to the two farmhouses.

“We only use it for outside, for watering the lawn,” the teen-ager said.

County health inspectors tested the newly activated well and found the water to be contaminated with nitrates, the same finding that caused the shutoff of the water in December. City officials ordered on April 12 that the new well be shut down within 24 hours. Konyn has yet to comply.

The two families’ water problems are the lesser of their concerns about San Diego city actions.

In February, a San Diego City Council committee voted to start abatement proceedings to condemn and raze the houses, which would leave the 17 members of the two families homeless. However, the councilmen agreed to allow a 60-day delay during which they hoped that a plan could be worked out that would bring needed repairs to the houses and a new water well.

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Their hopes were in vain. On Wednesday, the same council committee despaired of ever resolving the health and building code violations at the two old residences and ordered city attorneys to proceed with the condemnation.

City officials, long aware of the feud between Konyn and Horwath and determined to stay out of the verbal and legal crossfire, blundered into its center when city building inspectors last fall, during a routine inspection, found that the two old farmsteads and more than three dozen other city-owned houses in the San Pasqual Valley did not meet the city’s building codes.

A subsequent check of water wells by the county Health Department showed that the one that provided water to the Zendejas and Fonseca households was dangerously high in nitrates--a compound that could come from organic waste or commercial fertilizer.

Konyn sees the action against his dairy employees and their homes as a step by the city to remove agricultural pursuits from the valley.

The dairyman doesn’t plan to go without a fight, however. And, now, he is fighting to obtain running water for the Zendejas and Fonseca families.

“I can’t see why they can’t use the water for flushing toilets and washing clothes,” Konyn argued.

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Health officials explain that nitrates are a cause of “blue babies”--infants born with a congenital heart defect--and of a host of other ills if the water is used as drinking water, for cooking or even for brushing teeth. Allowing nitrate-contaminated water to be piped into a house is against state and county health regulations, they said.

Because TMY Farms holds the lease on the property and houses, the city notified Horwath last fall to fix up the houses and provide uncontaminated water to the tenants or face legal action from the city.

Horwath and Konyn already were pitted in a legal battle over who had to maintain houses that were on TMY’s lease but occupied by Konyn’s workers. Nothing was done to fix up the houses.

The city then ordered San Diego Gas & Electric to cut off power to the water well pumps, effectively cutting off running water to the two families on Dec. 18. Toilets couldn’t be flushed, bathwater had to be carried in buckets and heated, the automatic washer had to be refilled with buckets of water at each cycle. Linda Zendejas, a spick-and-span housekeeper, found her life becoming much like that of a frontier housewife as she tried to keep her home and her family neat and clean.

Bill Knowles, who oversees the city’s agricultural leases, said that the simple answer to the complex problem would be to transfer the two homes on the TMY lease to Konyn because Konyn has pledged to fix up his workers’ houses.

This simple solution died because of other disagreements between Konyn and Horwath.

Konyn agreed to remedy the water and building code problems, but only after the water was restored to the two farmsteads and the lease for the houses transferred to him. Horwath agreed to transfer the leases on six homes occupied by Konyn Dairy workers to Konyn, but only after Konyn dropped all litigation against TMY involving the upkeep of the houses. Neither man would budge.

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Horwath also has threatened to file suit against the city if the city transfers TMY house leases to Konyn without meeting Horwath’s terms.

Horwath feels that he is the injured party in the dispute because “Konyn knew what shape those houses were in when he subleased them from me” in 1978. Horwath feels that the dairyman should take over the houses, as is, and drop his lawsuits against TMY.

“I’ve been trying to reach an agreement since last July,” Horwath told councilmen Wednesday. “I’ve given up hope.”

Deputy City Atty. Joe Schilling, head of the city’s code enforcement division, said that letters are already on the way to the Zendejas and Fonseca families notifying them to vacate their homes within 30 days or face eviction.

Raul Zendejas Jr., informed of the pending eviction, shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “We have no letter yet,” was all he would say.

Councilman Dick Murphy, when it became apparent at Wednesday’s committee hearing that the matter had not been resolved, expressed the frustration that showed in his fellow council members’ faces: “You have tried the patience of this committee. All this time has been spent on this matter and still no repairs have been made, no potable water supplied.”

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“It’s like trying to unscramble an egg. It’s impossible,” Councilman Cleator said.

He blamed the present legal tangle on the original 1978 city agreement that granted TMY the lease to the land and the houses but granted Konyn the right to lease the houses from Horwath for use by his dairy workers and their families.

Konyn was absent from Wednesday’s council committee hearing and reportedly out of town on business. But Horwath was there and agreed with a city manager’s recommendation to proceed with action to raze the two stately old farmhouses.

Councilman Bill Mitchell, who in the past has championed Konyn and sympathized with his employees’ plight, also was absent from the hearing. But Mitchell aide Bob Trettin voiced the councilman’s view that Horwath was “being rewarded” for failing to repair the houses on his leasehold.

He said that Konyn had pledged to provide all the repairs to the homes, to deepen the water well and to sheath its upper portions to ensure that nitrates could not contaminate the water again.

John Melbourn, county environmental health chief, confirmed that the nitrate levels in the water from the original well and from the newly activated well were high enough to pose a significant health hazard to the two families. He also said the water was bad enough to force the city to shut the two wells down and declare the houses uninhabitable because of the lack of potable water.

Melbourn was pessimistic about Konyn’s chances of bringing in a well of potable water in the valley. The soil there is saturated with nitrates from organic fertilizers and from organic wastes from dairy and beef cattle, he pointed out.

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Many contaminating substances, such as bacteria, viruses or phosphates, are filtered out as they seep down through the soil, he explained. Nitrates are not. They seep into the deepest aquifers, contaminating the underground water supplies.

None of the experts can answer the puzzling questions: Why are the wells on the Zendejas and Fonseca properties the only ones found to be contaminated? Why are there no other residents in the valley facing eviction because of contaminated water wells?

Nor can anyone supply the solution to the problem soon to be facing the Fonseca and Zendejas families: Where do a family of eight and a family of nine members find affordable housing when they are forced to move from their two-story farmhouses on Old San Pasqual Road?

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