Judge hears testimony over land sale dispute

BEAVER CITY -- Furnas County District Judge James E. Doyle will consider 7 1/2 hours of testimony and 30-or-so exhibits following a trial Monday in Beaver City in which the widow of a Cambridge farmer sued a corporation, owned in part by a 44th District Legislative candidate, over a 1995 farm purchase agreement.

Phyllis Brown, the 84-year-old widow of Joseph R. ("Bobbie") Brown, claims that Republican Valley Wind Works, a corporation owned by brothers Dick and Frank Shoemaker of Cambridge and McCook, has not made any annual payments on the farm they purchased from her and her husband since 2001.

The Shoemakers argue that the Browns have "repeatedly" broken promises and breached their contract.

If Frank Shoemaker's primary election vote is not changed by a recount with fellow candidate Jeff Tidyman, Shoemaker will face Mark Christensen in the November general election.

Dick and Frank Shoemaker and their families are shareholders of, and Frank Shoemaker is president of, Republican Valley Wind Works, which claims that the Browns have committed a series of broken promises and breaches of the farm purchase contract entered into on April 7, 1995. The Shoemakers are asking Judge Doyle to determine losses from these breaches and to ascertain the balance outstanding on the purchase of the farm.

Frank Shoemaker testified that the original purpose, in 1975, of the corporation called Republican Valley Wind Works (RVWW) was that of buying and leasing airplanes. The corporation was dormant from the middle 1980's until the purchase of the Brown property in 1995, he said.

Shoemaker testified he was farming a dryland farm about 11 miles from the Brown "homeplace" at the time that real estate agent Mark Hamel of Arapahoe approached him about buying the Brown farm land in early 1995.

Through negotiations between Frank Shoemaker and his attorney, Eric Eisenhart, and the Browns and their attorney, Ward Urbom, Republican Valley Wind Works and Browns agreed to and signed a contract for the sale of the entire farm, which Shoemaker testified, included the farm land, 15 grain bins, the "Quonset" building and the straight-wall 50x100-foot metal storage building. The Browns would retain the house, the block "barn" building, a mobile home, various wooden storage and hog and chicken buildings and a number of old school bus bodies. Shoemaker said there was never any question in his mind that the contract, which includes "all steel buildings," included the "Quonset" and the straight-wall farm building. "I would not have purchased the property without the large metal storage buildings," Shoemaker said.

With the inclusion of the buildings, Browns' asking price increased from $625,000 to $700,000, which is the amount that the Shoemakers' corporation paid.

The metal storage buildings were part of the farming operation, Frank Shoemaker said, and a significant part of the farm's purchase price.

At the signing, Frank Shoemaker testified, he was to get immediate possession of the Quonset® and the steel storage building. "But, Mr. Brown said to me, 'I want to leave some personal property in there until my auction in the fall,'", which Shoe-maker said he agreed to.

Despite a personal property and farm equipment sale in February of 1997 (nearly two years after the contract was signed), the Browns continue to store personal property in the buildings and have locked them, Shoemaker said. "I do not have possession of the buildings today," he said. "They're padlocked, and I have had no access since April 2001."

Shoemaker said it became apparent as he irrigated the land that first summer and again in 1996 that the amount of irrigation equipment available on the farm (and included in the contract -- pipes, wellheads, motors, fittings, gates, etc.) was not sufficient to irrigate the land properly. Shoemaker said he also "relied on their (Bobby and his son, Jerry) promises of help" to learn how to irrigate the land, as his other farm was dryland and he had no experience with irrigating. However, Shoemaker said, Bobbie hadn't farmed the land in a long time and Jerry left soon after to start a new venture in Colorado.

Shoemaker said he was not able to successfully irrigate with Jerry's drawing of how to lay out pipe.

On a sale bill circulated before the auction in early 1997, Shoemaker said he discovered that the Browns were selling irrigation equipment that Shoemaker contends was needed to irrigate the original "home place" which he bought.

The Browns, their attorney and the auctioneer agreed to remove a pipe trailer from the sale, but not an Oldsmobile 455 V8 motor used to run an irrigation well, a Gifford-Hill walking sprinkler, a Berkley pump (new and in the crate) and syphon tubes.

Shoemaker testified that because he could not irrigate with the equipment left on the farm, he began the installation of two center pivot systems in the spring of 1997, and discovered an exposed, rusting natural gas pipeline, not previously disclosed by the Browns, in a row of trees and covered by debris. The pipeline fed an irrigation well operated by neighbors, so, Shoemaker said, he was reluctant to cap the line.

The Browns and Mrs. Velda Sayer, the neighbor, refused to help with expenses to bury the pipe, Shoemaker said, so he purchased plastic pipe and fittings, hired a company to fuse the old and new pipe, and had his brother's company, the Cambridge Telephone Company, bury the pipe. "It was a dangerous situation ... a rusted steel gas line on top of the ground," Shoemaker said. " We couldn't farm around it."

Shoemaker testified that capping the line would have angered the neighbors to the north and wouldn't have resolved the growing problems with the Browns. Purchasing the pipe himself and paying to have it installed were his efforts, he said, at "doing the best I could to use my property."

Shoemaker also testified that he paid back taxes and penalties owed by Jerry Brown on two grain bins on the property "to avoid legal action" by the county to collect back taxes.

The 15 grain bins were full or nearly full when Shoemaker purchased the property, he said, and Brown asked for time to move the grain. Shoemaker said he "figured 30 days, and it ended up being six months." Some of the grain was not moved until October 1997, he testified.

Shoemaker said he lost the use of the grain bins for his own harvest -- "I had to store my wheat at the Holbrook elevator," he said -- and/or the loss of rent money if he were able to rent the bins to another producer.

Another matter of contention, Shoemaker testified, was the disposition of scrap metal that had accumulated on the farm over the years and remained after the farm sale. Shoemaker said he was willing to allow Brown to retain half of the money garnered by the sale of the scrap metal to a scrap metal dealer, but he never received any accounting for the proceeds a sale.

Citing breeches in the contract and Browns' locking of the metal buildings in April of 2001, the Shoemaker corporation did not pay the annual payment of $52,155 in 2001. "I had always hoped that Mr. Brown would give me possession of the storage building, but with the lock, it was clear he had no inclination to comply," Shoemaker said.

The Browns filed a lawsuit for nonpayment, and the judge ruled against the Shoemakers and the RVWW corporation. The corporation made the 2001 payment, but has not made any annual payments any since that time, Shoemaker said.

Shoemaker said he has declined since 1995 to file his own lawsuit against the Browns. "I was doing all I could to make the agreement work," he said. "I had no desire to be in an argument with these people. I didn't want to fight with them." He concluded, "I kept every promise until June 1, 2001."

Bobbie Brown died in May 2005, at the age of 83.

Jerry Brown told his family's attorney, Kelly Sudbeck of Cozad, that his parents "did not intend to sell the homeplace," the house and outbuildings, although his father did want to sell the farmland. "He needed the place to putter around," he said.

Phyllis Brown also told Sudbeck that her husband intended to sell only the farm ground and drew up a listing agreement with real estate Mark Hamel to that affect. However, she said in earlier testimony before Shoemaker's attorney, that she and her husband both negotiated and signed the final purchase contract, in the presence of both their and Shoemaker's attorneys, at the Browns' attorney's office in Arapahoe, to sell the entire farm, with a list of buildings retained by the Browns.

Jerry Brown told Sudbeck that the irrigation equipment sold with the farm was sufficient to irrigate the land, and that the irrigation equipment sold on the sale was equipment that he owned and had used on other properties that he irrigated.

The Gifford-Hill walking sprinkler, he said, was owned by his father and given to him. The Berkley pump was purchased as "a spare," he said, and sat on a shelf in a crate. "It was never used on the farm," Jerry Brown said, "and it sold on the sale."

The Olds 455 engine, too, was purchased as a spare, Brown said, and was never used on the property.

Jerry Brown said that Frank Shoemaker used his (Jerry's) tractor and planter to plant corn the first summer after the sale, and that Jerry drew up a map to lay out irrigation pipe.

The corporation received the equipment indicated on the map, Jerry Brown said, but added that he did not know why here was not enough pipe to follow his drawings.

Brown contends that the grain bins were not full when the RVWW corporation purchased the farm, and that 23,000 bushes were hauled out in 1995. Brown said that Shoemaker did not indicate that he would charge a storage fee for grain left in the bins.

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Judge Doyle gathered the exhibits together and told the Browns and Shoemakers that he would take the case under advisement. He will contact the attorneys with his decision.

Eisenhart said, following the trial, that the Shoemaker corporation does not have a total of losses. "We'll leave that, and a determination of an outstanding balance, to the judge," he said.