The next Saturday, I met Susan Blake outside the clubhouse. Susan was another director, a fifty-eight-year-old former municipal administrator who had served only two years on the board. She tended to speak less during meetings than Linda and Richard, but when she asked a question it was usually about a specific cost, contract, or deadline. That was one of the reasons I trusted her enough to have a brief conversation in an open place.
"I've received notice of the hearing," she said. "I haven't reviewed all the evidence yet, and I don't want to prejudge it."
"I wouldn't ask you to."
"Then I have one question. Is the city ownership document authentic?"
I gave her the public reference number so she could obtain it independently. She wrote it on the back of a receipt and thanked me. I did not show her the recording or summarize what the other neighbors had told me. She was going to sit in judgment of a complaint involving us, and an unscheduled private presentation could have created its own questions about fairness.
"I do want an accurate process," Susan said before we parted. "Whatever the outcome."
"So do we."
Two days later, the association's landscaping contractor confirmed an unexpected detail that should have settled the ownership question years earlier. Gary knew a crew supervisor, and with the contractor's permission we reviewed the publicly available description of the mowing area in the service agreement. It included the municipal strip as part of a continuous maintenance route, even though the contract identified it as outside the condominium parcel. A note in an old attachment explained that trimming it at the same time was more efficient than asking a second crew to visit a narrow patch of grass.
The contract did not give Cedar Landing title to the land or authority to regulate all activities there. It simply explained why the HOA had been paying to keep the strip neat. Richard could have found that out with one call. Linda could have found it out by reading the agreement she had referred to whenever a resident complained about landscaping expenses.
I forwarded the relevant public record to Daniel Hsu and asked that the board consider it alongside the property documents. He acknowledged receipt and added it to the hearing packet. He also sent Emily the detailed notice of her hearing date, which would occur at the next monthly meeting in the clubhouse. The procedure allowed her to request a private session, but she chose to make her portion open to members who wished to observe, because Linda's claims had already been repeated in public and through management notices.
"I'm not doing that to shame her," Emily explained to Daniel. "I'm doing it because I want the decision made against the same facts that everybody is hearing."
He said the board would still conduct any personnel or executive discussion privately, and that residents could offer comments only during the designated portion. That seemed appropriate. Our goal was not to invite a crowd to shout Linda down; it was to ensure that a rule-based hearing could not be quietly replaced by a deal conducted in somebody's living room.