The permitting records arrived in uneven batches. Some documents referred to an earlier shoreline improvement proposal, others to individual cabins, and several to the dock operation. Every permit contained a disclaimer that the applicant was responsible for establishing ownership and lawful access. The county had reviewed safety and construction matters based on submitted plans, not certified the association's title. David highlighted those disclaimers and set them beside the survey.
We also discovered that the HOA itself was not the only entity involved. Mountain Vista had created a rental management operation with separate accounts, and individual investors had bought the cabin structures under agreements that assumed the association controlled the sites. The sales materials included a right to participate in the rental program and descriptions of lakeside occupancy rights, but they did not contain recorded deeds to the soil beneath the cabins. The contracts were polished, complicated, and full of words like exclusive, perpetual, and guaranteed. The title exhibits were much less impressive.
I studied a sample offering statement until the words blurred. Garrett had represented the project as a secure investment in a Colorado luxury destination, with professionally managed bookings and projected annual returns between fifteen and twenty percent. The asking prices for the cabins had ranged from about $180,000 to $220,000. If the individual investors had bought all 109 structures at prices near those figures, more than twenty million dollars of private savings had been committed to cabins standing on a shoreline the seller did not own.
The buildings had cost roughly twelve million dollars to construct, according to the HOA's own publicity. Their total sales to investors were substantially higher, and the rental management operation projected as much as eight million dollars in annual gross receipts. A thirty-percent management share would make the association's side of the business valuable even after expenses. Garrett had not simply put up cabins to beautify a neighborhood. He had created a machine that turned my shoreline into an income stream for the people controlling it.
One afternoon, David placed a copied email on my kitchen table. It came from a county planner to Mountain Vista's development consultant during the early design stage. The planner had asked the applicant to clarify the ownership of the eastern shoreline before finalizing the parcel references. The response said the development team was verifying the applicable water and land records. We had not yet found a follow-up confirming that verification. David circled the unanswered question in red.
"This is important," he said. "It shows someone noticed a problem before construction." I asked whether that meant Garrett had knowingly lied. David told me not to jump ahead of the evidence. A question in an email did not prove fraud, and we needed to establish who saw it, what they did, and whether somebody else later supplied an answer. Still, the email made it harder to accept Garrett's claim that he had done perfect research.