| A state district judge Wednesday
told a couple who lived in the KB Home Creekside
subdivision they couldn't sue the homebuilder for not
disclosing the couple was sold a house in a 100-year
floodplain.
The ruling puts to rest a yearslong controversy for
KB Home, but it will have little effect on a separate
nondisclosure lawsuit set for trial next month.
KB Home sought to remove the floodplain issue from
a lawsuit they filed against Abel and Sherree
Martinez, a retired couple that the homebuilder claims
breached an agreement to repurchase an allegedly
defective house.
The Martinezes in turn have filed a counterclaim
alleging KB Home tried to make them accomplices in a
fraudulent land sale by preventing them from
disclosing what they knew about the house's defects.
"Based on what I heard," 166th District Judge
Martha Tanner said, "it appears the neighborhood
didn't come into the floodplain until after the house
was built."
Creekside abuts Culebra Creek at Westover Hills
Boulevard. Various flood map revisions have put as
many as 198 and as few as a dozen houses in the
100-year floodplain. Presently, the Federal Emergency
Management Agency map has only portions of 26 lots but
no houses.
City drainage department records show that early
1990s engineering maps KB Home gave the city show the
subdivision outside the floodplain.
Tanner said the arguments she heard led her to
conclude that FEMA didn't revise the map until after
the 1998 flood.
However, an earlier FEMA map also showed the area
in the floodplain, according to a defense exhibit.
On Feb. 16, 1996, exactly one year before the
Martinezes bought their house, then-Bexar County
engineer Raymundo Rendon Jr. wrote to FEMA chief
Michael Buckley requesting a revision of the map,
which on that date had much of the subdivision in the
100-year zone.
During construction of the subdivision, KB Home
made drainage improvements and said it believed that
the floodplain wasn't an issue when it was
constructing houses.
The issue first became public in 1999 when the
Creekside neighborhood association complained to City
Council that they couldn't get a permit to build a
playground because the area was "newly designated" as
in the floodplain.
The city determined that mining on a neighboring
property by Del Mar Investment Group was delaying a
FEMA revision. After threatening the mining company
for code violations because its activities had
adversely affected the flood channel, the issue was
resolved in late 2001. |
