We also received the resort's internal revenue projections. The headline figure Garrett liked to quote was eight million dollars a year in possible gross rentals at expected occupancy rates. Actual revenue was lower during the early operating period, but still large enough to support management fees, debt payments, and distributions to investors. The structure gave Mountain Vista a thirty-percent management share before certain expenses, while cabin owners received the remaining rental proceeds under their contracts. The more successful the project appeared, the harder it became for anybody on the board to ask whether the land had ever been acquired properly.
I stared at the numbers and thought of the $48,000 I had paid annually in property taxes. I had maintained roads, shorelines, water structures, and forest on land the resort was now exploiting without paying me a dollar. Garrett's promotional materials called the lake a community asset. The phrase made me feel as if my family had been erased from the landscape and replaced by a line item on a marketing slide. I asked David to include not only the commercial use of the land but also the damage to the shoreline and the cost of restoring it.
David prepared the trespass claim and sought $2.5 million based on the unauthorized occupancy, commercial benefits, and documented damages. He was careful about how those figures were calculated. A court would not simply multiply whatever revenue Garrett boasted about and hand it to me as punishment. We needed testimony about the affected acreage, comparable uses, physical impacts, the term of occupation, and amounts supported by the evidence. I learned more about valuation disputes that autumn than I had during decades of engineering work.
Garrett's lawyers began an equally serious attack on the drawdown. They demanded engineering reports from the past sixteen years, asking how often a complete reservoir inspection had been necessary and why the program had been initiated after the dispute began. They found the earlier partial inspections and argued that those had been sufficient before the cabins appeared. They also collected angry statements from cabin owners who said they had never heard of a potential drawdown when buying their investments. I had no difficulty believing those owners were telling the truth.
During my deposition, Marcus Westfield placed a photograph of the exposed lakebed in front of me and asked whether it made me happy. It was a question designed for a headline, and David objected before I answered. I said that seeing the basin empty was painful, but I was relieved the dam inspection was proceeding safely and that the illegal commercial use was no longer generating the same revenue. Westfield asked whether I had considered the financial harm to the cabin owners. I told him I had met some of them, including Patricia Moreno, and that their situation had troubled me deeply.
"Yet you continued," he said. "Yes," I answered. "Because their financial loss did not create title to my land." Westfield paused, then asked whether I had ever offered to sell the shoreline to Mountain Vista.
I said I had never been approached with a legitimate request to purchase it before construction, and that Garrett had refused a discussion about removal after I discovered the encroachment. Westfield suggested a reasonable man would have negotiated a lease once the cabins existed. I told him a reasonable developer would have asked whose land he was standing on before he sold a hundred and nine cabins.