Using two different names, a member of the Placer County Planning Commission has participated in land transactions that at a minimum skirt the intent of state planning rules.
Since 2000, Michelle Ollar-Burris and some of her real estate clients have been buying, selling and subdividing properties in the rural communities east of Auburn, according to The Bee's review of property records.
In at least six cases, new rural neighborhoods have begun to spring up since Ollar-Burris or her clients purchased and divided acreage. Off of East Weimer Cross Road, for instance, one 93-acre piece of land purchased by Mary Smith -- the other name used by Ollar-Burris -- was split into 21 lots in two years.
The transactions appear to run counter to state law intended to prevent the haphazard division of land into de facto subdivisions without adequate roads, drainage and other improvements. Those criticizing Ollar-Burris accuse her of breaking that law.
"I think it's ironic that here she is being asked to enforce the very laws she's violating," said Jim Forman, a Placer County planning commissioner for the past nine years.
Ollar-Burris, 61, an Auburn real estate broker and outspoken property rights advocate, blames the criticism on political foes.
She acknowledges she sometimes buys and sells property under the name Mary M. Smith, but says that Mary Michelle is her given name and Mary Smith is the name on a trust set up in the early 1990s when she was briefly married to a man named Dennis Smith. In one case, using the name Smith, Ollar-Burris tranferred property to herself.
"I can assure you, without a doubt, that I have never done anything illegal," said Ollar-Burris, a former Sacramento County sheriff's deputy.
The accusations against Ollar-Burris center on the state Subdivision Map Act, which bars a single owner from splitting a parcel more than four times without the more rigorous subdivision review process. Subsequent interpretations of the law by the California attorney general say it also is intended to bar a group of investors from working together to split parcels repeatedly, under different names.
Ollar-Burris said she's not doing anything unusual. She said parcel splits -- not subdivisions -- are the dominant way new home lots are created in the rural communities of eastern Placer County. There, local zoning generally requires homes to sit on more than two acres of land, and curbs and sidewalks are rare.
Placer County's current planning director, Michael Johnson, said Ollar-Burris' activities have raised no red flags for him since he took the job in October 2005, either.
"We check all the parcel maps that come in for compliance with the Subdivision Map Act," Johnson said.
The department checks to make sure the same person is not subdividing a parcel more than once, he said, and looks for patterns involving the same people.
Asked whether he was aware that Ollar-Burris has sometimes bought and sold property as Mary M. Smith, however, Johnson hesitated, then said, "I'm not familiar with that name. I'd have to look into that."
Fred Yeager, who retired as planning director in August 2005 after 33 years with the county, said that before retiring he had received a complaint from a local lawyer about Ollar-Burris' activities. He was sufficiently concerned, he said, that he referred the matter to the Placer County District Attorney's Office.
"It appeared to me that it was possible that there was some portion of the activity that was suspect," Yeager said.
Members of a citizens group doing its own investigation of Ollar-Burris say they have since delivered a second packet about her activities to the district attorney.
District Attorney Bradford Fenocchio's executive secretary, Jo Ann Ewasko, said there's no information in the department's tracking system indicating any information about Ollar-Burris was received, or that anyone looked into it. Fenocchio did not return calls seeking comment.
Under the state's map act, once someone subdivides a piece of property, any subsequent subdivider must have purchased the parcel in an "arm's length" transaction, according to the 1972 attorney general's opinion. Otherwise, the property owner must seek county approval of a subdivision map.
Evidence that a transaction is not arm's length, the attorney general then wrote, can include: "Selling land to a business associate, selling land for less than its true value, retaining a financial interest in the land, or generally a transfer which is part of a conspiracy to evade the Subdivision Map Act."
In at least six locations reviewed by The Bee, Michelle Ollar-Burris -- or Mary Smith -- shows up in real estate records as a recurring link in a chain of land sales and parcel splits that result in one piece of land being subdivided into multiple home sites.
On at least two occasions, she has received property from clients who had just subdivided it. County property records indicate the price was "$0," based on the absence of taxes paid on the transactions. In an e-mail, Ollar-Burris said she had "no idea" why no taxes show up on the records.
Ollar-Burris and the same small cadre of clients consistently appear in these successions of parcel splits, and she frequently lends money to the buyers of her properties. Sometimes she enters into partnerships with them, too.
Bay Area lawyer Robert Merritt, author of an often-cited manual on the Subdivision Map Act, reviewed Ollar-Burris' activity at The Bee's request. He described the transactions as "pretty blatant" violations of the map act.
"It looks like these people are agents of hers," Merritt said. "It seems very strange to try to call these things 'arm's length.' The same people keep popping up over and over again."
A violation of the state map act could carry criminal penalties of up to a year in jail and $10,000 in fines. If a county determines that lots have been illegally created, it could slap the current owners with fees and additional planning requirements.
"The people who buy these properties could be faced with substantial legal problems in order to rectify the illegal lot split," said Forman, Ollar-Burris' fellow planning commissioner.
Going the parcel split route takes less time than the formal subdivision process and requires less environmental review. In Placer County, subdivisions must be approved by the Planning Commission, rather than by the three-person panel of county staff that reviews lot splits. Standards for roads and other improvements often are higher for subdivisions, too.
"There's a substantial reduction in improvement standards, and therefore costs, when you're not doing a subdivision," said Dean Prigmore, former assistant planning director for Placer County.
Subdivision developers also have to produce a report -- approved by the state Department of Real Estate -- disclosing to potential buyers soil conditions and other issues affecting lots offered for sale, and guaranteeing that they are buildable, said department spokesman Tom Pool.
Ollar-Burris defended the real estate transactions as nothing more than the sale of land to clients. She said she does not guarantee to buyers that the properties listed by her Sierra Brokers real estate office in Auburn can be subdivided.
In addition, she said, loans to her clients don't constitute a "financial interest" as defined by the state map act, but instead are merely another way to earn money, through interest.
"After the sale of properties I have split, I have retained no ownership interest," she said. "My sole involvement has been as an independent lender or as a real estate agent."
Asked why she sometimes receives parcels for nothing after they have been split, Ollar-Burris said that isn't the case. She said that she either pays full price or swaps property with her clients.
In the transactions reviewed by The Bee, the person most frequently involved in land sales and property splits with Ollar-Burris was Sacramento real estate investor and lawyer Thomas S. Van Horne. Other names that popped up included Stephen Johnson, an Applegate lawyer; investor Michael Butler of Grass Valley; and Jerald L. Jones, a custom home builder from the Auburn area.
These names were submitted to various government agencies, including the district attorney, by a citizens' group that has spent months investigating land deals involving Ollar-Burris.
Butler declined comment and Jones and Van Horne did not return phone calls from The Bee. Johnson asked for questions to be e-mailed to him. He responded that he has done business with Ollar-Burris for several years and has always found her to be a "stickler for details and doing things by the book."
Members of the group bought and sold properties to one another from 2000 until at least 2006, according to property records. In one exchange, Van Horne bought property next to Johnson and Jones and subsequently adjusted the property line -- a change that made it easier for Johnson and Jones to divide their land into three parcels rather than two.
Once again, county tax records reflect a price of "$0," but Johnson said he recalls that a payment of about $5,000 was included in the ultimate accounting for roads and other amenities.
"It was cheaper for us to kind of partner up," he said.
Prigmore, the former assistant planning director for Placer County, said the chains of sales and splits are so long and convoluted they would be difficult for any county staff member to catch.
"You can obfuscate with complexity, and I think that's exactly what they're doing here," he said.
Prigmore retired in 2002 after 30 years with the county, though he continued working one day a week as the county's zoning administrator until December. He said current county employees are afraid to speak publicly.
"People who used to be my employees have mentioned it to me and have said, 'This is just not right,' " he said. "These are people who have to put their kids through college. They need the job. They're not as likely as me to speak up."
The allegations against Ollar-Burris are emerging against an intensely political backdrop.
Ollar-Burris was appointed in 2005 to the Planning Commission by newly elected Supervisor Bruce Kranz, a conservative heavily supported by developers. Kranz defeated Rex Bloomfield, who favored stronger controls on growth.
Ollar-Burris and her husband, real estate broker Wes Burris, donated $3,380 to Kranz's election campaign in 2003 and 2004. Van Horne and his late wife, Patricia, donated $4,198 in that same period. Both couples ranked among Kranz's most generous donors.
Before she was appointed to the commission, Ollar-Burris led a successful legal challenge to the county's plan to build affordable apartments near her home on the edge of the American River canyon in Auburn.
Kranz said he appointed Ollar-Burris because of her extensive knowledge of the planning process. He said she is doing "an outstanding job" as a planning commissioner, and he brushed off accusations about her real estate transactions.
"That's her personal business," Kranz said. "She's got to deal with her personal business herself. I purposely stay out of it."
George Wasley, a planning consultant from Grass Valley who handles nearly all of the lot splits for Ollar-Burris and her frequent clients, suggested that disgruntled county employees, past and present, are spreading rumors because they don't like the way Ollar-Burris has treated them.
Often, he said, she has pushed staff to explain why it takes so long for the county to process applications from developers.
Wasley singled out Yeager, the former county planning director who left soon after Ollar-Burris took office.
"There was no doubt that Fred and Michelle didn't get along, but he didn't get along with anybody that had the word 'Realtor' or 'developer' next to their name," Wasley said. "He was a no-growth advocate, and that's why he is no longer with the county."
Yeager said that he retired in 2005 in part because of the political shift in Placer County with Kranz's election and subsequent appointment of Ollar-Burris.
"The county certainly was changing," he said. "Politically, it had moved farther to the right."
But Wasley's portrayal of Yeager was contradicted by some real estate brokers and public officials.
"I worked with Mr. Yeager and the Planning Department on many occasions, and always found him to be completely fair to all parties," said Skip Outman, an Auburn-area broker. "He is highly respected in the entire community. I've never known his integrity to be questioned as he did his job to enforce county policy."
Placer County Supervisor Robert Weygandt said Ollar-Burris is "clearly very suspicious of the motives of people who disagree with her, particularly at the staff level."
The citizens group tracking Ollar-Burris' activities is working to make sure the controversy doesn't die. Some will speak publicly, but others insist on remaining anonymous. They include people fighting a major development planned for Foresthill and pending before the county. Kranz and Ollar-Burris represent the Foresthill area.
The critics have spent months amassing detailed records tracking land transactions by Ollar-Burris and her suspected associates. In fall 2006, they submitted copies of their documents to Placer's district attorney, the state attorney general and the state Fair Political Practices Commission. In December, they gave their file to the Placer County grand jury.
So far, no public action has been taken.
Placer County Counsel Anthony La Bouff, who concurred with Yeager's decision to send the initial complaint to the district attorney, said he's not surprised.
"This stuff is very difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt," La Bouff said. "What I get is the sense that while there may be a lot of smoke, the people who have looked at it haven't found any fire yet."
The Bee's Mary Lynne Vellinga can be reached at (916) 321-1094 or mlvellinga@sacbee.com.