The balance climbed. The first fine remained, the daily charges accumulated, and a subsequent account statement rounded the total and additional assessments to three thousand dollars. I checked the arithmetic and asked the management company for a ledger separating penalties from administrative charges. They sent me an updated summary without the underlying authorization.
When Celeste came to deliver the three-thousand-dollar notice herself, I was under the hood of my truck. She stood just outside the shade of the garage and waited until I had wiped my hands. Her face was composed, but the way she held out the letter suggested she expected the amount to impress me. I folded it and placed it in my pocket.
"You seem like a man who thinks he knows more than everybody else," she said.
"No, ma'am," I replied. "Just more than you about this particular water tank."
For two seconds she looked as though the sentence had reached a place behind her smile. Then she recovered and explained that continued noncompliance would leave the association no choice but to arrange removal. I asked whether the board had authorized any contractor to enter my property. She said the association had remedies available to it and advised me not to force the issue.
Her car had barely disappeared before I called a lawyer. I had spent weeks hoping the board would follow its procedures without being dragged toward them. Now my property was facing a collection notice, and the president had begun speaking of physical removal as if it were a scheduled landscaping appointment. Whatever lesson Celeste thought she was teaching me, it was time to introduce somebody whose job was to understand the limits of private covenants.
The lawyer's name was Mara Bell, and she practiced property and association law in a small office above a bank on Milford Road. She was close to sixty, spoke carefully, and had the useful habit of refusing to promise a client a victory before reading the documents. I arrived with a folder thick enough to make her receptionist ask whether we needed a larger conference room. Mara looked at the tabs and said she had not seen a homeowner organize an initial consultation like a construction submittal in quite some time.
We spent most of the appointment separating questions that Celeste had spent a month treating as interchangeable. Was the installation permitted by the county? Yes. Did the association's recorded declaration require a separate approval for some exterior changes?
Probably. Did the particular provision cited by Celeste cover my tank, and had the board followed the necessary procedure to enforce it? Those were disputed questions, and they were the only ones Mara wanted to answer before recommending a next step.
"You should have asked for architectural approval in advance if the declaration clearly required it," she said.
"I read it before I ordered the tank," I answered. "The language about rear utility installations wasn't clear."
"Then we need to argue that language, not pretend a county permit made the covenants disappear."