PRESIDIO COUNTY — Two of the county’s richest men are continuing to battle over access to travel through a massive ranch southwest of Shafter, and a district court hearing last Wednesday at the Marfa Courthouse revealed more details of legal proceedings.
The hearing, before 394th District Judge Monty Kimball, heard motions to disqualify Rod Ponton — an attorney for defendant Johnny Weisman and his Flying W Ranch — and a plea by the Flying W to halt the case to better define which parties should be involved. The plaintiff — Cibolo Creek Ranch, owned by John Poindexter — sued in June after what it calls longstanding access to travel La Morita Road out of Shafter to its other properties to the east were blocked with gates locked by the Flying W. Both Poindexter and Weisman have made fortunes, the former in heavy trucks and equipment and the latter in state highway construction.
Cibolo Creek Ranch contends that Ponton should be disqualified from the case as a Flying W attorney because he served as the Cibolo ranch’s counsel and an advisor on numerous real estate explorations over more than a decade. In an affidavit, Ponton disputed that argument and wrote that he was only contracted as counsel on one occasion to help collect debt on a sale of hay in 2018. All other dealings were informal and served to connect people who were interested in real estate transactions, he wrote. Ponton began serving as an attorney for Weisman in 2022, and Weisman bought that 66,000-acre Flying W ranch (formerly the Lely ranch) in 2024.
Attorneys for the Flying W testified that La Morita Road crosses several landowners’ properties heading out of Shafter — land owned by the Rinehart family, a state-owned parcel, part of Big Bend Ranch State Park, and a plot of Borschig Ranch land, and that each of these owners and their heirs should be party to the lawsuit. Cibolo Creek Ranch filings disputed the need for additional parties because it said it had deals to cross those properties, and thus, only the access through the Flying W gates was in question.
In the lawsuit, Cibolo Creek Ranch asserts that La Morita Road is the only way to access their “Harper Ranch” property in which cattle there were under threat of starvation if they couldn’t access them. The Flying W answered that two other routes — inconvenient but viable — were available from the east from either Casa Piedra Road or state park land. Cibolo Creek Ranch manager Tom Davis filed an affidavit with photos showing that both of those options did not connect and ended up in dead ends — one a locked gate of Borschig Ranch land and the other an expanse with no road and miles of desert scrub.
Judge Kimball has not ruled on either of the motions.