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​A settlement has been reached with one of the parties named in a lawsuit that grabbed national attention for its allegations of racial bias in a Marin County home appraisal.

A nonprofit fair-housing legal advocacy group that brought the federal lawsuit with the homeowners announced a settlement deal with AMC Links LLC, a Utah-based appraisal management company named in the December 2021 federal lawsuit brought by homeowners Tenisha and Paul Tate-Austin. Terms of the agreement are confidential.

But the case is ongoing against the other defendants — appraiser Janette Miller and her San Rafael company, Miller and Perotti Real Estate Appraisals Inc. of San Rafael, according to Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California.

“We are in the discovery phase now, and the case is set for trial for fall of 2023,” Peattie told the Business Journal in an email Wednesday.

According to the complaint, Miller’s appraisal of the home was based on the race of the couple, who are Black, and Marin City neighborhood. The couple bought a Pacheco Street home in Marin City for $550,000 in December 2016 and refinanced it in 2020.

Miller valued the home at $995,000. The couple thought that was low and had another appraiser evaluate it. But first, they removed indications of the racial background of the owners. That valuation came in $1.48 million, close to the median market value for Marin at the time, court documents said.

Attorneys for Miller and her firm filed an answer in mid-September to an amended complaint, denying the allegations and calling for a jury trial.

The real estate industry has been coming to terms with bias in the business in recent years. The National Association of Realtors issued new guidelines in 2020 to guard against discrimination.

And earlier this month, the California Association of Realtors issued an apology for its endorsement in the 1950s and 1960s of “racial zoning, ‘redlining’ and racially restrictive covenants” and opposition to the state’s first fair-housing laws.

Peattie said her organization has filed two other administrative appraisal complaints about racial bias. One is with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity group, and the other with California’s Civil Rights Department.
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She said the agencies are investigating the claims, but the matters haven’t been resolved yet.

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If this week is any indication, Attorney General Rob Bonta is on a mission.
On Wednesday, he announced that his office would conduct an independent investigationinto last year’s redistricting in the city of Los Angeles following the explosive publication of a secretly recorded meeting in which three city council members and an influential labor leader could be heard making racist comments, insulting their colleagues and plotting how to draw city council district boundaries to consolidate Latino political power.

• Bonta said in a statement: “The decennial redistricting process is foundational for our democracy and for the ability of our communities to make their voices heard — and it must be above reproach. The leaked audio has cast doubt on a cornerstone of our political processes for Los Angeles.” 
• Nury Martinez, who stepped down as council president on Monday, announced her resignation Wednesday. Gov. Gavin Newsom applauded the move, but stopped short of calling on Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, the other council members present at the meeting, to resign. The governor’s reticence marks a sharp departure from other top Democratic officials: President Joe Biden on Tuesday said all three council members should step down. 

Also Wednesday, Bonta issued an update on his office’s efforts to limit the spread of fentanyl, a super-powerful synthetic opioid largely responsible for record-high fatal overdoses in California. Since April 2021, Bonta said, his office has seized more than 4 million fentanyl pills and nearly 900 pounds of fentanyl powder and performed more than 200 arrests. 

• The update may have also served as an implicit clapback at Nathan Hochman, the Republican former federal prosecutor running against Bonta for attorney general. Hochman has repeatedly slammed his Democratic opponent for failing to act aggressively on fentanyl, including in a campaign ad that says California has seen a 2,100% uptick since 2016 in the number of residents under age 24 dying from fentanyl poisoning.

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