Antelope Valley Home Buyers Soaked With Big Water Bill

Karen and Jim Tribbey had been living in their new, pale blue Cape Cod-style home in Palmdale about three months when they found out about the $11-million water bill.

The young couple looked for two years before they found a nice home they could afford, even if it meant commuting nearly 100 miles a day to their jobs in Los Angeles, and even if, as Karen put it, “There’s nothing out here.”

There is nothing but flat desert expanse beyond the short streets that so far make up the Marlborough Country Palms subdivision, and since there is not even a full-scale water system, the developers formed a consortium with 21 other landowners and the county to create a “community facilities district.” Made possible under the state Mello-Roos Act of 1982, the district is the first of its kind created in Los Angeles County, although they exist in 40 other areas statewide.

Through this district, bonds will be issued to finance county water pipes, pumps and tanks to serve the area. Future homeowners--not the developers--will foot the bill.

But the Tribbeys and several other homeowners say they did not know that a water delivery system was lacking when they put deposits down on their homes. And they soon learned that under the law, the developer, Marlborough Development Corp. of Century City, in fact did not have to tell them.

They did not know, they said, until they were notified last month of a Superior Court proceeding to validate the newly formed district. It was only then that they learned that an assessment they thought they would be paying for parks and recreational facilities was instead largely going for the water system.

Now, they learned, they will be paying a $247 annual assessment for water facilities for 30 years. And bills for water itself, which local officials estimate range from $25 to $100 a month in tract homes in the Antelope Valley, will be extra.

The water coming out of their taps now, they found out, was just an “initial allocation” from Los Angeles County to enable Marlborough Development to begin construction on approximately 100 homes, out of a planned 330.

So-called Mello-Roos districts are increasingly used as a way to finance public facilities, often new schools, needed in new developments, according to Dean Miscyznski, a consultant with the state Senate Office of Research. They are a variation of traditional assessment districts that are popular with developers, he said, because they provide a way around the restrictions of Proposition 13, which require two-thirds voter approval for new taxes. In Mello-Roos districts, developers, as landowners, can vote to impose the taxes before their home buyers move in.

Disclosure of the special tax assessment to home buyers has occasionally been a problem, Miscyznski said, though the law provides that buyers be informed at the time of escrow.

But the Tribbeys and others in Marlborough Palms said they feel that they should have been told earlier, before they put down their deposits, particularly if an assessment is for a major utility such as water.

‘Stabbed in the Back’

“I feel like I was stabbed in the back,” said Karen Tribbey, an accounting administrator. “If they knew what they were doing, why didn’t they tell us up front?”

“If you disclose to people what you’re doing, you give people a choice in the matter,” said Preston Meltzer, a teacher who moved to Marlborough Palms in March. “It’s either, yes, I can afford this, yes, I want to pay it, or no.”

“Who buys a car without an engine?” Lewis Cohen, another homeowner, asked. “I never dreamed I bought a house that did not have water coming into it.”

Cohen said full and early disclosure is particularly important in the Antelope Valley if water is involved because water is already a sensitive issue in the rapidly growing desert communities. Since county planners estimate that the valley’s population will triple--from an estimated 137,000 last year to 305,000 by the year 2010--the cost and source of future supplies are major local concerns.

“Suppose five years from now we get another assessment,” Cohen said, “and five years after that?” he asked. “Where does it end?”

New Assessment

Phil Wood, a leader of the Palmdale Community Assn., an umbrella group of 31 local organizations, said the concern is not unfounded. A homeowner who lives close to Marlborough Palms, Wood started paying a new, $600 annual assessment for water three years ago. “We had to redo our wells because the water was running out,” he said. “With all this development our water table lowered.”

“There’s going to have to be more sources of water brought in in order to keep up with the growth that’s going on,” John M. Sidwell, a board member of the Palmdale Water District, said. “As a whole, the valley is being pumped faster than it’s being replenished from natural resources.”

“No one can guarantee” that these homeowners will not someday face additional charges, said Bob Larson, assistant deputy director of the county Public Works Department, whose Waterworks District 34 covers the area affected by the Mello-Roos tax.

“We never anticipated it was going to be this brouhaha,” Marlborough Vice President Michael J. Romeo said, after eight homeowners recently picketed his Palmdale sales office over the water tax. “All this is is another form of paying for the product we give them.”

Marlborough, he said, had organized the consortium of 22 owners, who control 1,100 acres, most of them in Palmdale between Avenue O and Avenue S. Plans call for the various developers to build 3,000 homes and a regional mall.

‘It’d Take Forever’

County funds did not exist to “build the necessary regional systems needed” for the development the owners wanted, Larson said. The developers had a choice of finding a way to finance water facilities, or they could wait to build homes until the county could afford to do it. “They could wait a century,” Larson said. “It’d take forever.”

Several homeowners also complained of the landowner election system allowed under the Mello-Roos law, saying it gives developers an unfair advantage over them. The law says that once a local government holds a hearing and approves the formation of a district, landowners can do the voting to approve it if there are less than 12 registered voters within its borders.

That is what happened in Palmdale. About 97 Marlborough homes have been sold, but only half a dozen homeowners had moved in by the time the county Board of Supervisors held a hearing in February. The board approved Community Facilities District No. 1 the same day.

Soon after, 11 landowners voted and approved the new district.

“To me it’s called taxation without representation,” Meltzer said.

Other Marlborough buyers scoffed at those who are complaining. “You buy a new home, there are always going to be tax assessments,” said Richard Light, who moved there from Chatsworth. “I don’t feel I was wronged.”

Disclosure Conflict

Marlborough went “beyond the requirements of the law,” Romeo said, when the community facilities district was being put together last fall, and notified the first few dozen buyers, such as the Tribbeys, who had put down deposits before plans for the new district were formalized, that there would be an assessment. Other buyers said they were were told at close of escrow. Many said the true reason for the assessment was not divulged.

Officials speculated that Mello-Roos districts may become more common in Los Angeles County. A second one has been approved by the county Board of Supervisors to finance a road system for a new development in Roland Heights, and Larson said more are in “the embryo stage” for water systems in the Antelope Valley.

In April, County Supervisor Mike Antonovich introduced a motion, passed by the full board, to have county agencies review Mello-Roos disclosure requirements, and recommend changes in local applications late this month.