Monterey County District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni announced Aug. 13 that Nicolas Mejia Ruvalcaba and Ana Ortiz Ruvalcaba, both 73, entered no contest pleas to charges of unlawful and dangerous housing they provided on their 23-acre property in Royal Oaks.
Nicolas Ruvalcaba pled no contest to two felony counts of tax evasion with the aggravated white collar crime enhancement, as well as misdemeanor charges of providing unpermitted housing and failure to maintain workers’ compensation insurance. Ana Ruvalcaba pled no contest to misdemeanor tax evasion, providing unpermitted housing and failure to maintain workers’ compensation insurance.
Judge Mark Hood is scheduled to sentence the Ruvalcabas on Sept. 29.
A civil enforcement action addressed numerous violations, including maintaining dangerous structures unfit for human occupancy, failing to install smoke detectors in occupied structures, operating a public water system without a permit and performing unlawful grading of slopes, among other violations.
Under the plea agreement, the Ruvalcabas will pay $800,000, which includes $450,000 in victim restitution, $134,560 in unpaid taxes to the California Franchise Tax Bureau, $67,174 in fines and costs to Monterey County Housing and Community Development, $10,588 in costs to the Monterey County Environmental Health Bureau, $10,000 in workers’ compensation fines, and $127,678 in civil penalties.
The Ruvalcabas must pay those amounts within 60 days or the court may appoint a receiver to sell their property to satisfy any remaining amounts, court records show.
Both defendants face up to 364 days in county jail when they are sentenced.
During the investigation and search of the Ruvalcabas’s property—which included interviews with witnesses—investigators determined that the Ruvalcabas received over $1 million in cash rental payments from tenants between 2020 and 2022, which they failed to report on their tax returns. An auditor calculated that the unreported income resulted in $134,560 in evaded taxes.
“The conditions uncovered in this case were not simply unlawful, they put families and children at serious risk,” Pacioni said.
