The Lawsuit: Novalk, LLC and Lia Sanchez v. City of Imperial, et al.
Case No. ECU004587 — Superior Court of California, County of Imperial (Hon. L. Brooks Anderholt)
Filed February 26, 2026 · First Amended Complaint filed September 9, 2026
Plaintiffs: Novalk, LLC, a property owner in both Mayfield and Bratton, and Lia Sanchez, a Mayfield homeowner and the proponent of the Mayfield repeal initiative
Represented by Andrew K. Rauch, InRem Law, Inc. — this is not a NOCFD lawsuit, but litigation brought by fellow property owners in these same districts
THE MAYFIELD BALLOT: City Council certified that Mayfield's tax-repeal initiative qualified and voted to put it on the November 3, 2026 ballot (Resolution 2026-14, April 15, 2026) — more than 27% of registered voters and 53% of landowners in the district had signed. But the City never sent the county's Registrar of Voters the map of the district's boundaries by the legal deadline, then tried to redefine the vote as citywide instead of district-only. On August 17, 2026, the Registrar wrote back: her office "cannot lawfully administer an election limited to the boundaries of CFD 2004-2" — so despite qualifying, the measure will not appear on the ballot. The lawsuit asks the court to order the City to fix its own paperwork and the County to actually hold the election voters already qualified for.
THE BRATTON PAYMENTS: A 2005 agreement obligated the City to reimburse the original Bratton developers for infrastructure — but let the City withhold payment if those developers hadn't paid their own CFD assessments. They didn't pay. By 2018 they owed the district roughly $396,000, growing since. The City paid them anyway: $450,000 in 2018, $102,338.69 in 2020, $100,000 in 2022, $40,000 in January 2024, $50,000 in September 2024, and another $50,000 in 2025 — over $790,000 to the same delinquent parties, while pursuing the current property owner for the underlying debt. The complaint calls this an unconstitutional gift of public funds under Article XVI, Section 6 of the California Constitution, and asks the court to stop it and redirect the money to pay down the actual tax liability instead.
WHAT THE COMPLAINT ALLEGES, IN FULL: Twelve claims in total — two writs of mandate over the Mayfield ballot process, a claim that the City refused to even consider waiving penalties on delinquencies it didn't cause, quiet title and cancellation of instruments over tax-defaulted parcels, relief from what the complaint calls void foreclosure judgments, a declaration on when CFD 2004-2's special tax must legally end, the taxpayer waste-of-funds and unconstitutional-gift claim above, money had and received, federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. §§1983 and 1988, inverse condemnation, and a claim that the penalties assessed amount to excessive fines under the U.S. and California Constitutions.
STATUS: The case is active and pending before Judge L. Brooks Anderholt in Imperial County Superior Court. Everything above is drawn from the Plaintiffs' own First Amended Complaint — these are allegations, not findings. None of it has been proven or decided by a court, and the defendants have not yet had their say. We'll update this page as the case moves.