AWKWARD MOMENTS DURING TRO HEARING ON LINCOLN PARK

By Juan Montoya
First attorney Michael Cowen's PowerPoint presentation didn't work.
Then, his cell phone – whose use is strictly prohibited inside the 138th District Court by Judge Arturo Nelson – rang not once, but twice, the second time after he had been told to shut it off.
"Whose cell phone is that?" an obviously irked Nelson asked the bailiff.
"It's mine Your Honor," Cowen said looking for the cell among his briefcase and papers.
"You know better than that," Nelson told Cowen after the first loud ring.
"Yes, Your Honor, I apologize."
Cowen tried not to appear rattled after he placed his notebook and tried to lead the court and spectators through his argument, only to get a blue screen with a few lines of white text on the bottom. He then outlined the main points of his argument for the granting of the TRO sought by his client Cameron County District Attorney Luis Sanez who is suing as a private citizen to stop the sale by the city of the 48-acre Lincoln Park.
But Cowen wasn't the only one to draw sharp rebukes from Nelson.
Obviously not convinced of city contract attorney Mark Sossi's contention that the city had not yet voted to sell the park and that the filing for the TRO was based on "speculation," the judge admonished Sossi to stop his remarks and had to repeat himself until Sossi got the idea and stopped talking.
He was aslso unimpressed that Sossi and Texas Attorney General's Office attorney William Deane insisted that commissioner Rose Gowen did not have a conflict of interest when she voted to approve the resolution to have city negotiators follow through on the sale of the 48-acre park. Both men said that Gowen worked for the UT unit in Houston, and not in Brownsville or the UTRGV.
"Let's weed through this before we address that," Nelson told the men.
When former mayor and real-estate appraiser Pat Ahumada was on the stand, both Sossi and Deane questioned his qualifications to speak as an expert on behalf of the plaintiff. They pointed out that he had never appraised public parks and that his comparables were not credible since some of the properties were not in the downtown district where the park land is situated.
Ahumada then had to explain that appraisals were done on the land, not on the uses that the buyer would make of it. He has been a certified appraiser since 1997, some 17 years, he answered.
He then counted off the six property sales and some listings as comparable to the Lincoln Park real estate.
"I appraised that at $209,5245 per acre," he said of one property.
"Three hundred and eighty-nine dollars per acre," he said of another.
"Three hundred and forty-eight dollars," he said of another.
The city has quoted the number $6.5 million that it will get from the UT System for the 48 acres that comprise Lincoln Park. According to his estimates, Ahumada said the land is worth $230,000 per acre, totaling approximately $11 million. The UT System has quoted an appraisal for the same land of some $8.8 million.
By comparison, the city purchased Abraham Galonsky's Casa Del Nylon – a half-city block with an empty building – at $2.3 million.
If sold, the city would be accepting a price of  only about $135,416 per acre for Lincoln Park, as the UT Regents called it, a "bargain purchase" sale.
This, Ahumada assured Dean and Sossi and the court spectators, is the price of the land only, not the amenities, baseball fields, flora and fauna, infrastructure, etc.
"It's a beautiful park," he said.
At about that time, Cowen's phone rang loudly once again and a bailiff grabbed it from his desk and took it outside the courtroom.