But who owns the land?

[Editor’s Note: Recent editions of The Forum have included columns by Elliott Stonecipher about Bossier City’s Walker Place and Boardwalk multi-use development projects on the Red River. Those editions and articles are available at theforumnews.com.]

Charles Smith’s decidedly unassuming place just off Benton Road in Bossier City serves as both his home and business.

He moved there from his family’s long-owned land and “home place,” taken by the city’s Boardwalk development on Red River’s east bank. The Smith family’s land certainly jumped in value over the years, in turn nurturing Smith’s dream to build and operate a theater on the Red. The dream morphed to nightmare, owing to a select crew of city officials unable to summon respect for those who pay them.

As we have learned, mega-losses by the taxpayers are the hallmark of “public-private” development projects conjured by Bossier City Hall. Too, they are hell-on-earth journeys for unsuspecting privateside interests who dare say “no” to anything the public-side gang dictates. U.L. Coleman Companies in Walker Place and Charles Smith in Boardwalk demonstrate the point. Smith, after many years, and with new developments feeding his perseverance, has yet to surrender.

Though the same bus load of city hall power abusers ran over both Coleman and Smith, Coleman could and did buy a bigger bus with which to respond. Smith could not. When his battle with the city began, so did huge legal bills. More than one attorney over the years worked for hundreds of thousands of dollars in hourly fees, and another individual did so for a piece of any financial settlement. A lawsuit concerning a part of the abuse Smith endured was settled years ago, but the settlement was less than what Smith owed to those others. His family land on the Red River might have easily made him millions, but instead cost him, incalculably.

To say the record of this sorry Bossier City Hall tale is complex is an understatement. What one learns in its research and study is how public malfeasance repetitively committed becomes their usual and customary way of thinking and officially acting. One learns in this work how Bossier City’s “public-private venture” model is tailored to abuse the public trust, how confected “appearances of fact” substitute for truth, and how an array of private attorneys and other “professionals” are serially rented and deployed at taxpayer expense to get certain city officials what they often unconscionably demand.

The outfit Smith encountered included Boardwalk’s developer, John Goode, but was run and dominated by City Attorney Jimmy Hall. In the tapes of pertinent city hall meetings (explained in my June 12 article), these two and several other high-ranking city officials are heard as they conspire to get Smith’s land at the southern end of the Boardwalk. Smith’s resistance, as with Coleman’s in Walker Place, made him a city enemy, not a potential seller whose price and terms had to be negotiated. After one typical such confab about Smith and his lustedafter land, here, verbatim, is Hall’s summation:

Hall: “I’ll take care of it from here. I, I think what I’ll do is just call Curtis and say, ‘Look, you either need to close this deal, or resign as his attorney ... one or the other’ ... and then ... and leave ‘im amok (sic) and we’ll just do what we have to do to get the property.”

“Curtis” is Smith’s friend of many years, Curtis Shelton, an attorney at the time with the Cook, Yancey, King & Galloway. Other attorneys there occasionally represented Bossier City, and the tapes make clear that as Shelton worked for Smith, Hall was working overtime to get Shelton to work against him. Even a person’s sacrosanct, we like to think, right to legal representation holds no sway with Hall & Team.

The Shelton-Smith relationship was years old, and their then-closeness surfaces in the city hall tapes as the two, along with another lawyer at Cook Yancey, are consistently and routinely derided and demeaned. Such ridicule in a roomful of “public servants” exposes city officials without the barest restraint, disgusted by those who oppose them. To this gang, members are superior, others are dupes or would-be dupes, and any who express opposition to them – Bossier’s City Council included – are political and/or personal enemies.

City Hall’s hijack ultimately succeeded, or so it seemed. Smith closed the sale of three additional lots he owned, Lots 1, 2 and 3, and later learned that documents he then signed set the stage for the city to legally argue that he simultaneously sold Lots 8, 9 and 10. The city’s assertion is centered in a claim that Lots 8, 9 and 10 were what are legally called the “... alluvian (sic), dereliction and batture lying between ...” Lots 1, 2 and 3 and the Red River. We might assume the records in the offices of the clerk of court and tax assessor would provide clear answers to such questions, but they do not.

Disputes as to ownership of the land have recently re-emerged. A part of the disputed Lot 10, one of the contiguous lots the city had to have, has been sold at a tax auction to another Bossier City resident. We should allow this fact a moment to sink in: A part of a lot Smith supposedly “sold” to the Boardwalk developer (and city) was purchased by another man, years later, for unpaid property taxes. Worse yet, as a reminder to Smith of the hell endured and yet ahead, on Aug. 23, 2012, a Cook Yancey attorney, hired to again clean-up after Hall Inc., wrote Smith to ask for his help in nullifying the auction sale. Unbelievably, the letter asks Smith not to pay property tax notices headed his way for the property the city claims he “sold” to the city and Boardwalk developer.

Even in Bossier City, logic and law attest, property tax notices go from the sheriff to the person who owns the property. The obvious suggestion, it follows, is that something Hall and others confected was not real and true and has now come back around.

Elliott Stonecipher is a native and resident of Shreveport, La. A graduate of Louisiana Tech University and Louisiana State University, he is president and owner of Evets Management Services Inc. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Stonecipher has committed to pro bono work on a range of local, state and national issues, including reform of governmental and political ethics, and reform of national policies governing the U. S. Census Bureau. His work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, and he has appeared on CNN and Fox News Channel.