Rancher fights city's own wall collapse
By Jennifer Hiller - Express-News
From a mostly quiet tract of land surrounded by the hubbub of urban life, Ernest Ruiz has waged a nearly three-year fight against the city of San Antonio over the failure of a retaining wall.
Property owner Ernest Ruiz has been fighting the city
for three years over the collapse of a retaining wall.
The city fixed the wall and cleaned up its own property
but has left Ruiz on his own.
In the summer of the epically wet 2007, a city-owned retaining wall that sits between Pearsall Park and Ruiz's South Side ranch collapsed during a rainstorm, sending dirt and debris onto his property and into Leon Creek.
"There were rocks all over the place," said Ruiz, a 72-year-old rancher who has been buying property in the area since the 1980s and now has about 265 acres that he calls Leon Creek Ranch. "When that rain came, it tore everything right down the middle."
While San Antonio rebuilt the damaged portions of the retaining wall and cleaned up its property, Ruiz said the city has done nothing to clean up his property, and he's still trying to recover.
He lost between 40 and 50 large, old trees, including pecan, elm, hackberry, black walnut and mulberry.
The pileup of dirt and debris also damaged fences, cut off access to 30 acres of grazing pasture and caused water to back up on his property, he said.
The city attorney's office didn't respond to interview requests for this article.
Despite the fix, soil from the city's original retaining wall continues eroding into the creek. The engineering firms and contractors for the retaining wall have denied Ruiz's allegations in court filings. One said the collapse was an act of God.
The case is going to mediation in May, and if no agreement can be reached, will go to trial after that.
The recent failure of a retaining wall in a Northwest Side neighborhood has garnered loads of attention, and the city has suspended the certificates of occupancy for 27 homes there.
Ruiz finds it ironic that the city criticized the builder and developer of that neighborhood for not having a permit for that wall, while it had its own wall fail.
He's also irritated about the city's focus on the tree ordinance, which tries to protect land from clear-cutting during development.
"Here they have an ordinance about trees," Ruiz said. Former Mayor Phil "Hardberger is out there hugging trees, and they're here kicking me in the butt."
Initially, Ruiz said city staffers talked to him about cleanup and replanting trees. Then at one meeting, Ruiz said a manager stepped in and said the city didn't have to do anything.
Ruiz sued the city and its contractors last April, just a few months short of when his attorney said the statute of limitations would have run out on him.
"He initially tried to handle this on his own," attorney Gregory Canfield said. "He's not the kind of guy who wants to run out and file a lawsuit."
The city in court records said it has governmental immunity and is exempt from liability. It also said that third parties over whom the city had no control may have been negligent.
"I don't understand,� Ruiz said. �It was city contractors on city property, but they don't want to fix it."
Ruiz slowly cobbled the land together starting with a 139-acre tract in 1983. He runs about 90 cattle on the property, and his family likes to fish for perch and blue channel catfish, hunt and hold barbecues and poker nights on the property. His grandchildren search for arrowheads.
But the property is surrounded by reminders of city life. Train tracks run adjacent to the ranch. The occasional aircraft doing touch and gos at Lackland AFB creates a roar that drowns out the sound of country music on AM 680, where the radio is set in Ruiz's Toyota pickup.
"They repaired their side and it's all cleaned up. He has a disfigured piece of land and they altered the flow of the creek," Canfield said. "Everybody wants to blame someone else."
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