Garrett issued a statement through his attorneys saying the association was disappointed and considering all options. He insisted it had relied on professional guidance and that the court had failed to appreciate the impact on the community. He did not explain why his development team had marked the title survey complete without producing one. In the days that followed, Mountain Vista homeowners demanded emergency meetings, account statements, and explanations of how a supposedly secure resort could end up with every structure on somebody else's land.
The numbers were frightening. The association had an annual budget of approximately $2.8 million serving 240 homeowners, and much of the financial strategy behind its lakefront venture depended on management revenue continuing to flow. That revenue had stopped. Refund claims, legal expenses, maintenance costs for unused cabins, and loan obligations were accumulating. Meanwhile, 109 separate investors had spent roughly twenty-one million dollars purchasing cabin interests that were no longer capable of producing the promised income.
A group of seventy-three cabin owners had begun organizing claims against the HOA and the people who marketed the investments. Their combined demand was approximately fourteen million dollars, with some additional claims likely to follow. The association's insurer reserved its rights and disputed coverage for allegations involving knowing misrepresentation or fraud. David said we needed to distinguish between what the insurer was denying, what the owners had alleged, and what any court had actually established. The financial exposure was enormous even without assuming that every accusation would ultimately be proven.
Garrett had treated the resort as the achievement that would define his years as HOA president. Now his name appeared on every newspaper article about the failure. Homeowners who once praised his vision were demanding to know whether he had personally approved misleading sales materials. Several board members resigned from committees before the end of the week. Others hired independent counsel, suddenly eager to separate their own decisions from Garrett's.
On December 12, David arranged a meeting with the association's new financial adviser and two board members who had not been directly involved in the original development. They came to his office without Garrett. One of them, a woman named Marisol Lane, apologized for the way residents had spoken about me during the summer. She said many of them had been told I was a hostile neighbor trying to seize an amenity their dues had funded. None of them had been shown the deed or the survey before the dispute became public.
"We were assured the land issue was settled years ago," she told me. I asked whether the board had ever voted to verify that assurance. Marisol looked down at her notes and admitted she had never seen a completed title report. Then she said the owners were afraid that ordinary homeowners might be assessed thousands of dollars for decisions they had neither understood nor controlled. Her expression reminded me of Patricia's when she had stood in my driveway. It was the look of somebody discovering that a promise made by a powerful person had quietly become a personal debt.
David kept the conversation focused on practical next steps. We needed the shoreline cleared, the land restored, and the dam's future refill schedule protected. The HOA needed to stop making promises it could not fulfill and preserve whatever resources were available to address legitimate claims. There was room for a settlement, he explained, but it had to be enforceable. A handshake from Garrett would no longer satisfy anybody.