I had sent the letter, followed procedure, documented every step of the response. Karen had threatened me, brought witnesses to my property line, and kept building. There was nothing left for me to do except wait for the county to pull the file. Then the county assessor's office mailed me something I hadn't requested, a certified letter. I opened it at the kitchen table.
Inside was a single page of formal legal description of the lakefront parcel stamped and dated by the county recorder's office. I read it twice. At the bottom of the page under the heading current owner of record was my name. Not the HOA, not the Caldwell estate. Mine.
The county had put it in writing unsolicited with a stamp and a date. I called Daniel. They sent it on their own. I said he was quiet for a moment. Then then the planning department has already started pulling the file.
They found something in what Karen submitted and they're starting to ask questions. This is moving faster than I expected. I looked at the certified letter on my kitchen table. Karen was a quarter mile away building a $12 million resort on that parcel. She had a project manager and a construction crew and a 4:1 board vote and a lawsuit threat ready.
And the county had just mailed me a piece of paper that said the land was mine. The Hendersons called me on a Thursday evening in April. I'd met them briefly 2 years earlier. Retired couple, early '7s. The kind of people who wave when you drive past and mean it.
Eleanor Henderson did most of the talking. She apologized twice for calling before she got to the point which told me whatever she was about to say had been sitting with her for a while. We've been paying something called a resort development assessment. She said $2,200 every quarter for over a year now. I asked her to say that again.
It comes with the regular HOA bill. Karen's newsletter called it a temporary capital contribution toward a community asset. We thought she stopped. We thought we had to pay it after what happened to the Garcias. Three other households called me within the same week.
Different names, same story. The amounts varied. Some had paid 2,000 per quarter, some closer to 3,000 depending on lot size. All of them had been paying it for between 12 and 14 months. None of them had been given a vote.