LeFever Mattson leaving a trail of lawsuits, broken promises amid sweeping Sonoma real estate buys

Grassroots opposition

While Mattson and Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin were discussing a possible partnership in the Springs a few months ago, community organizer Veronica Napoles said she noticed some long-awaited activity in the weedy vacant lot at Lanning.

“They went out there with one guy wearing a tool belt, to create concrete forms,” she said. “I have a degree in architecture. I know what it takes to make concrete forms. And you could do that in less than two days. But it was just a pretend show. And it’s still over there, cyclone fence and a big mud pit. No one’s been back.”

It was Napoles and Mary Samson who co-founded the grassroots group Wake Up Sonoma. Their mission is to bring attention to what they call a land grab by LeFever Mattson.

While Mattson and LeFever slow-walk their projects, other property owners are able to move things along, Napoles pointed out at a Feb. 23 town hall she helped organize for Wake Up Sonoma.

“In the Springs we’ve had a 92-unit apartment building that started underway last summer,” she said that night. “It’s almost near completion.”

For the growing number of residents who are hostile to Ken Mattson, who represents the local face of the duo, these languishing sites translate to small businesses getting shoved aside, neighbors forced to live across the street from eyesores and the threat of declining property values.

“They are not developers,” Napoles said of Mattson and LeFever. “They are investors.”

And local government is noticing.

Sonoma City Council member Ron Wellander refers to such lots as “see-through buildings,” a phrase that has stuck with him since he heard it from a developer 40 years ago.

“I don’t like see-through buildings,” Wellander said, “because it suggests that something’s not healthy.”

Wake Up organizers proposed some remedies at the town hall, including a vacancy tax on dormant properties — San Francisco voters approved one last November — and an ordinance requiring any company with a certain number of holdings to submit a long-range plan.

Sonoma City Council has already had preliminary discussions about the vacancy tax, Wellander said. The second proposal is new, the council member added, and he’d have to look into it. But he didn’t dismiss the idea.

Mattson’s Piedmont project

The city of Piedmont, a tony enclave completely surrounded by Oakland, came up with some measures of its own to check Ken and Stacy Mattson.

In January 2009, the Mattsons requested demolition of an existing carport and terrace at one side of their historic, Julia Morgan-designed mansion on Farragut Avenue there, and to build a three-story, 2,300-square-foot addition in its place.

Four neighbors addressed the Piedmont Planning Commission at a meeting and “voiced their frustration over the 12 years of construction activity that has occurred at the property, the applicant’s flagrant disregard of planning approvals and conditions in the past, and their concern that Mr. Mattson will fail to abide by any new conditions or timelines imposed by the Commission,” according to minutes of the meeting.

The commission approved the project, but mandated several conditions, including a construction management plan and completion schedule.

Three years later, the Mattsons were back before the Piedmont Planning Commission, requesting to make numerous other modifications to the house. The commission approved that one, too, but “voiced its disappointment that many of the proposed improvements have already been constructed without prior design review approval,” the minutes read.

In Sonoma, the city hit LeFever Mattson with a stop-work order in January 2020 after finding unpermitted work on the historic General’s Daughter building.

In addition, several LeFever Mattson properties in Sonoma have incurred tax liens, including the Moon Mountain parcels and a rural tract at the end of Maffei Road.

After buying the Maffei Road property, KS Mattson Partners sued the sellers, Benedetti Farms, alleging they had unlawfully removed equipment that was supposed to be included in the deal.

Paper trails

Like many developers and large property owners, Mattson, LeFever and their companies have left a paper trail of lawsuits — several dozen over the past 25 years. Most involve evictions, or “slip and fall” cases involving people who slipped on a wet laundry room floor or were injured on a rickety staircase, for example.

A couple of cases stand out, though.

One is California Investment Builders vs. Kenneth and Stacy Mattson, filed in August 2012 in Alameda County Superior Court. Santa Rosa-based California Investment Builders claimed the Mattsons owed them close to $110,000 for structural, engineering and landscape work at a Piedmont home.

What made the case interesting is that Mattson and Tim LeFever were partners in California Investment Builders when the company was formed in 2006 and held an interest until it was dissolved in 2014 after this apparent falling-out.

Another case, Theresita and Manuel Cabacungan vs. Specialty Properties Partners LP et al, is more sweeping.

In that complaint, filed in October 2022 in Solano County Superior Court, lawyers for the Cabacungans allege Mattson accepted $100,000 in 2011 to invest for the Fairfield couple in real estate, then ignored repeated requests for information over more than a decade.

The Cabacungans lost it all, the suit claims. They sued for negligence, fraud, financial elder abuse — they were in their 60s when they invested the money — and other counts. The case was settled in January; the terms are confidential.

Among other allegations, the lawsuit requests “a declaration that KS Mattson Partners LLP is a fictitious entity not authorized to do business in California but utilized by Defendant Mattson as part of a shell game to defraud investors.”

It is clear from public documents, especially bank liens, that Mattson and LeFever have relied on a large group of investors to finance their real estate purchases.

Mattson and LeFever have plenty of supporters, too.

Frank Bragg, who now lives in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, wound up selling a house in Sonoma to KS Mattson Partners. He thinks residents here should embrace people “like Ken and his lovely wife” for creating tax revenue that funds schools, roads and police.

“I can say we had a sale that was 100% wonderful, and there was never anything he did that was not disclosed,” Bragg said. “It was the smoothest escrow I’ve had among at least 60 in my life. The man even allowed me after closing to ask him a favor.”

Supervisor Gorin, who said she understood the concerns of Sonoma Valley residents who opposed the Springs Plaza proposal in her 1st District, spoke warmly of her interactions with the developer.

“I found him to be professional, personable, committed to the project we’d been working on together, and certainly creative and expansive in his thinking,” she said.

But there are many Sonoma residents who would reject the positive assessments.

One of them is David Daniel, who was general manager of Ramekins, General’s Daughter and parts of the Cornerstone complex when LeFever Mattson bought them in January 2019.

(The previous ownership group was led by Darius Anderson, managing member of Sonoma Media Investments, the parent company of The Press Democrat.)

Daniel initially welcomed the acquisition.

Mattson began sharing a grandiose vision of what he would bring to Sonoma, according to Daniel. His plan, he said, was to acquire all of the parcels between Cornerstone, just below the Big Bend intersection, and Eighth Street East; the land along the abandoned railroad right-of-way there; and additional properties along the Highway 12 corridor in the Springs.

Daniel was enthusiastic about the “bike path” concept. But he noticed that whenever he would share the plan with others in front of Mattson, his new boss would deny having said it.

“It was a strange situation for me,” said Daniel, 56, who grew up in Glen Ellen and has lived in Sonoma Valley for almost his whole life.

Steve Page, the retired president of Sonoma Raceway, had his own frustrations.

Page lives on a cul-de-sac east of Sonoma city limits. Like a lot of people in that neighborhood, he and his wife often used a footpath that allowed them to avoid streets — some of which don’t have sidewalks — to walk into downtown.

It was part of the old railroad right-of-way, and when Mattson bought it four or five years ago, Page said, Mattson told him it would be part of the bike path network.

Shortly after the purchase, Mattson closed the section of path behind one of his properties, telling Page he had to fence it off while he brought in some heavy equipment for a demolition project. He said the trail would reopen when the work was done.

Four years later, it remains unusable.

“Shutting this path was a significant inconvenience, and I’m sure it has not helped his standing among folks in this part of town,” Page said.

In the early months of his ownership, according to Daniel, Mattson seemed carefree with money. Daniel brought in support to help create an HR department, set up controller duties and hired on-site conflict resolution consultants.

“If we needed something, I could just order or purchase it,” he said.

The largesse began to disappear when Mattson brought in “his people” to manage the properties. The team included a maintenance man, an electrician and a restaurateur. After that, Daniel said, few projects were resolved or completed.

As the grievances mount, and as the real estate portfolio of LeFever Mattson blooms, more and more Sonoma residents are demanding answers from Ken Mattson.

“He definitely has this kind of ‘aw shucks’ behavior, where he can be very cordial and sweet,” Daniel said.

“But there’s also kind of a carny, don’t-look-behind-the-curtain kind of thing. He’s a good salesperson. And he’s practiced at it.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.