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Almost exactly four years after the city-parish sued local contractor Radu Cosman over his controversial $10,000 purchase of a prime tract of undeveloped land at the busy intersection of Bluebonnet Boulevard and Jefferson Highway, the case remains stalled in 19th Judicial District Court.
“We were working towards a settlement but it never got finished,” Cosman’s attorney Loren Kleinpeter says. “It’s been sitting on the back burner. If we can work out some details, we can get it finished.”
The February 2017 sale of the 50,000-square-foot corner lot raised eyebrows, after it came to light that Cosman snagged the land for $10,000 as the lone bidder in an auction.
Daily Report first broke the story, after which, the city-parish ordered an appraisal that found the land to be worth more than $600,000.
Later that year, the city-parish filed suit to rescind the sale based on lesion beyond moiety, a principle in the state civil code that gives a seller one year to recover a piece of land if it was sold for less than half of the fair market value.
Kleinpeter has argued that the city-parish land sale is basically a court-ordered sale, which the civil code states is an exception to lesion.
In the months that followed, the two sides went back and forth and appeared, at one point in early 2020, to be nearing a settlement.
But the pandemic closed the courthouse for months and dockets got backed up.
Since then, neither side has shown much urgency about settling the case. Kleinpeter says it has not been a high priority, and attorney Mary Olive Pierson, who represents the city-parish in the suit, says she has been focused on other cases, namely her litigation over the prospective city of St. George.
Kleinpeter says he is hopeful the matter can be settled soon.
