A dispute that began with a collapsed rockery wall — and was followed by a failed lawsuit, and a community divided — came to a close this week. The rock wall dispute was a years-long legal battle between the Somersett Owners Association and various parties, including contractors, developers and eventually Somersett Golf and Country Club.
SOA reached a settlement agreement with SGCC to share the costs for repairing the collapsed upper and lower rockery walls near the course’s Hole 5 hillside—a project that’s slated to run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The saga began in February 2017 when the two rock walls failed during a winter storm. According to a story in the Reno Gazette-Journal, the SOA filed a lawsuit against a handful of parties and lost. Judge Elliott Sattler in October 2019 ruled against SOA’s interpretation of the statute of repose, then limited to six years, which set the time period construction defect claims could be brought.
With the developer, contractors and engineers off the hook, the fight turned inward. SOA took SGCC to court in June of this year. The upper failed wall is on SOA property and the lower failed wall is on SGCC leased property.
However, legal fees for SOA have been racking up for nearly three years, diverting funds that could’ve been used for the repairs.
In a statement on the settlement, SOA president Mark Capalongan said three new board members elected in November helped to shift negotiations between the two parties.
“We knew there was a new opportunity to negotiate a solution and that became our top priority,” he said. “Both sides have remained divided on key issues, but we spent countless hours crafting and exploring new ideas and finally developed a solution that both sides could live with. Neither side got all it wanted, but everyone agrees this was a win-win and we concluded with a fair deal for both parties.”
The solution, according to the Somersett United community blog, is for SGCC to make payments to SOA over the remaining 44 years of its lease at $5,980 each year, totaling just over $263,000. That figure was determined based on costs already expended by both parties and split 50-50.
By reaching an agreement, Capalongan noted in his statement, both parties will save themselves from “months of litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in ongoing and future legal fees, which both the SOA and the Club can now spend in more productive ways.”
