At the start of 2010, the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego had an impressive land empire across the county, containing some 421 separate properties that county records show it owned or co-owned.
The lawsuit says that the diocese transferred hundreds of properties in the autumn of 2019, just weeks before Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that opened a three-year window allowing lawsuits alleging sexual abuse that happened years ago — long after the legal deadline for filing such lawsuits had expired.
The effort was slowed by the complexity of the transactions and bureaucratic delays from the state, he said. There was also a lawsuit in San Francisco that contended the similar transfer of 233 properties by the diocese there was subject to transfer taxes, which could amount to a multimillion-dollar tax bill. A Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the diocese in that case in 2012.
The analysis confirmed that the holdings then declined dramatically that year. By the start of 2020, the diocese owned or co-owned 76 properties — an 80 percent decline in a single year. In nearly all of those transfers, no money changed hands and they were done for no monetary consideration. Zalklin said in an interview that the assessed value of the disputed transferred properties as well as the property the diocese still owns are only an indicator of the actual value because the assessed value does not take into account what the property would sell for today. “Clearly there is a difference between an assessed value and a real market value,” he said.