Part One of Series on “Saving the “Ilocano Farm”

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Community Meeting - This Sunday

                              PLACE:      Farias Family Home

                                        ADDRESS:      12853 Avenue 416 (next door to Pena's Disposal)
DATE/TIME:      Sunday (July 6)  --  3:30 PM

Please invite all your family, friends and neighbors! 
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How do you understand greed and corruption in government?  The first thing, you must be able to recognize it.  Legal land grabs schemes is how most indigenous and nonwhite people lost their native lands to white settlers ... all done legally and through the court/judicial systems.  That's in fact, how the West Was Won.

Here is the situation: The “Ilocano Farm” is composed of two parcels.  Back in the 1990s, this land was sold by one of the older Filipinos to a housing developer.  The former owner thought they might have been an Overseas-Asian development company but never knew since it did not respond when they foreclosed on the land for nonpayment of a secured Note.  The furthest this developer got was submitting a plat map to the county for the subdivision and get one-1 parcel rezoned for SFR-1 (single family residence).  However, this developer abandoned the entire project when this same water district told this developer that it did NOT have the sewage capacity. 

The note holder took over the land, but could not sell it for anything else but farming.  That's when we came on the scene.  We bought it, secured the farming variance from the County for the rezoned parcel.  It was granted because it showed the land had never been used for anything but farming.  We bought the second parcel through a tax auction. 

We were weeks from closing our escrow when the title company received a fax from OPUD saying that they just recorded a lien for $63,000  -- our sale price was $65,000.  So the former owner and I decided to talk to the Board. And of all days, on Sept. 11, 2001, both the former owner and I went to court to request that the water district remove the land from the district and thereby relieve us of the liens. The voted YES. However, their crooked attorney unilateral overturned this board action – without any formal action. Nevertheless, we closed escrow upon the assurances of this attorney that "we could work it out."

Bad mistake because what that attorney turned around and did was attempt to pressure me to sign a Deferral Agreement saying that I would never challenge the "validity" of the liens!  Of course, I refused to sign and soon after was sued for the entire amount of $127,000.

The big challenge here is organizing the folks of this small, rural town to clean up its water district which is its only local public agency.  Unfortunately, the United States loudly broadcasts all about the corruption of Third-World nations (puppet regimes, military governments, and the like) so that many people in this country think that government corruption exists "over there" but "not here."  It's come to the point, that most people in the United States don't know how to recognize corruption or know how to fight it ... in all its manifestations.  And that's how this has come all about.  The story of a water district that is in the pockets of housing developers ... bringing big money on the backs of the poor people, many of who work as field laborers like most the Filipino Americans here in Orosi. 

 
The Ilokano Farm is located at 41760 Road 130, Orosi, CA 93647. 
Ms. Galviso can be contacted at (559) 528-0107.

(To be continued . . . )

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