news story / By Ryan Burns

Arkley v. Humboldt

Potential Loleta subdivision sparks land-use lawsuit against county government

(Nov. 26, 2008)  Rob Arkley is suing Humboldt County. Well, technically, two of his numerous real estate syndicates are. The disputatious Eureka businessman is up in arms over delays at the Planning & Building Department. Seems he has some prime real estate down in Loleta that he wants liberated from red tape, and he’s not about to abide the Planning Department’s plodding timetable.

The battle surfaced on the agenda of last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting, where the Supes held a closed-session powwow with County Counsel to address the suit, brought in the names of two Arkley-owned limited liability companies — Ocean View Ranches and RDHC. (The latter reportedly stands for “Rob’s Duck Hunting Club.”) The property in question covers nearly 500 acres of centrally located Loleta farm- and grassland, which Arkley purchased in a series of transactions between 2000 and 2006 for a total of almost $4.5 million. Rolling grassy hills scattered with spruce and pine, the land is bisected north-south by U.S. Hwy. 101 and straddles Loleta Drive, extending west to the edge of town, north past the railroad and east into the brush-strewn fields beyond Singley Hill Road.

GALLERY >

Perhaps looking to subdivide the property, Arkley wants the Planning Department to determine the number of individual lots he’s got. (Or, more accurately, he wants them to agree with his assessment of the number of lots.) His companies’ lawyers say the County has been stonewalling the effort for more than a year and a half, dragging their bureaucratic feet way slower than the usual tortoiselike rate of governmental movement.

The lawsuit, filed in Humboldt County Superior Court on Oct. 22 and served to the County on Nov. 7, goes so far as to suggest that the Planning Department has been procrastinating on purpose, inflicting “arbitrary and capricious” delays and throwing up one hurdle after another, thereby violating the companies’ right to procedural due process. “The County has repeatedly attempted to defeat [Arkley’s] vested property rights,” the complaint alleges, “by creating new obstacles … without any basis in law.”

What Arkley’s after is called a “certificate of compliance,” a county ruling on the total number of potential individual parcels contained on a given property. Humboldt County Senior Planner Martha Spencer said landowners often pursue certificates of compliance when they’re getting ready to sell off their property piece by piece. (She couldn’t comment on the specifics of Arkley’s case since it’s currently in litigation.)

“Often times we see somebody who has a large ranch that may have been in the family for a long time, and it may have been acquired in bits and pieces,” Spencer said. “So we look to see how many legal lots they have.” The determination is based on a number of factors, she said, including when the property was purchased, its physical characteristics and its zoning. Arkley’s land is zoned agricultural.

The rulebook for these decisions lies in the Subdivision Map Act of 1976, a law that established the current standards for property divisions. Before that, Spencer said, such divisions were often done informally, “on the back of napkins.”

Arkley bought the land from local contractor/engineer/businessman Trueman Vroman. Now 65 and retired, Vroman told the Journal that over the years he has had his own share of run-ins with the Planning Department, including a similar dispute over this very property.

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