A federal court jury on Thursday found the Department of Public Lands liable to pay a landowner for the taking of his land in Gualo Rai in the early \u201990s.<\/p>\n
After deliberating for six hours, the jurors reached a finding that DPL, as the successor agency to the defunct Marianas Public Lands Authority, owes Antonio S. Camacho some $239,397.<\/p>\n
Camacho\u2019s property was taken on Feb. 28, 1992. The jurors determined that the fair market value of his land during the taking is $95 per square meter. <\/p>\n
The jurors found that a 6-percent annual interest rate should be applied to compensate Camacho.<\/p>\n
Camacho\u2019s lawyer, Michael Dotts, said they are very pleased with the verdict.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the case says is that, if the government doesn\u2019t pay your land compensation, you don\u2019t have to wait for 14 years. You can go to court,\u201d Dotts said.<\/p>\n
With the jury\u2019s verdict plus court costs, the lawyer said his client will get over $240,000 from the government.<\/p>\n
Camacho filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the NMI in 2005 against DPL and the Department of Public Works over the government\u2019s taking of his Gualo Rai property in 2003.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government said, \u2018We pay you $71 per square meter. \u2026That works out to $67 per square meter and Camacho said, \u2018No, that\u2019s too low.\u2019 So the government said, \u2018We\u2019ll pay you $54 square meter and, by the way, about half of your land was taken by the Japanese so we don\u2019t owe you for that,\u2019\u201d Dotts said.<\/p>\n
Camacho is now working at a golf course in Seattle. He moved there in 2005 due to the bad economy in the CNMI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A federal court jury on Thursday found the Department of Public Lands liable to pay a landowner for the taking of his land in Gualo Rai in the early \u201990s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}