After nearly a year of inactivity, developer Nitin Kamath’s civil suit against New Rising Sun Baptist Church has picked up again, with the most recent development taking place Monday.
Court minutes show that on Dec. 9, Judge Tim Kelley denied the plaintiff a partial motion for summary judgment that Kamath had originally filed Aug. 30. According to attorney Loren Kleinpeter, who is representing Kamath, that’s because Kelley said he had to determine the credibility of the witnesses before rendering judgment.
“He couldn’t issue a summary judgment in our favor without a hearing,” Kleinpeter says. “I thought what he said was a positive for us—a summary judgment is exacting, but he felt he needed to hear the witnesses.”
At the center of the legal battle is a dispute over ownership of a certain tract of land along Highland Road, near the Country Club of Louisiana, where Kamath planned to construct the thwarted, 61,000-square-foot Aztek Cove mixed-use development. The parish attorney’s office ultimately recommended against granting building permits for the proposed development.
In his motion for summary judgment, Kamath had claimed that, while the tract of land he owns and the adjoining tract owned by New Rising Sun Baptist Church were created by a survey plat signed and stamped by Alphonse Fabre, Fabre did not prepare or perform any survey work on the plat, nor did he supervise any survey crew members preparing the plat.
Instead, Kamath stated all of the work was completed by Elmer Jones, who is not a licensed surveyor, and that the church hired Jones to survey the tract in order to purchase 2 acres. But Jones made mistakes in subdividing the plat, Kamath states, going on to claim “with eastern and western boundaries that are roughly parallel, it should be patently obvious to a title examiner, that an error in the metes and bounds description of Tract D-1 was made in preparation of the Survey.”
Meanwhile, New Rising Sun Baptist Church, represented by attorney Robert R. Johnson-Robertson, filed a motion for opposing summary judgment Oct. 25, alleging they were not made aware of any errors with the plat, which they purchased in 2000, until 2018. The church also states they hired another general contractor and architect to review the plat map to construct the church and parking lot.
Johnson-Robertson could not be reached for comment before this morning’s deadline.
The next step is for both parties to go to trial, for which a date has not yet been set.
