Chapter 2

Phyllis froze for a second, then said the lake was community property and that she did not need to justify the community's own regulations to one of its members. Then she turned and walked away.I sat there for a while after they left, the fine resting on my knee. Then I looked again at the document—not at the amount, but at the field labeled "Location of Violation." It said: Lake area, common grounds. No parcel number, no assessor identification code, no legal description of the property.That mattered to me. I had spent 30 years reading technical drawings and legal specifications. In every real document, location means precision. This wasn't precision; this was assumption dressed up as authority. So, I folded the fine, put it in my pocket, reeled in my line, and went home.That evening, I pulled out my original purchase paperwork from 2012. My deed covered lot 47. Nothing more, nothing less. No mention of lake access rights, but more importantly, no restriction on lake use either. Then I opened my laptop and searched the county assessor's database. When the record for the lake parcel came up, I leaned forward. The current owner was not Maplewood Estates HOA. It wasn't any HOA entity at all. It was Greenway Development LLC.And right next to that name was a status note: Entity dissolved. March 2019.I spent the next afternoon doing what I had always done best: building a picture from documents instead of assumptions. Within two hours, I had every public record tied to the lake parcel, APN 2847. The full surface of Silver Creek Lake and a 30-foot perimeter buffer had been retained by Greenway when the subdivision was created back in 2001. Greenway sold the homes, but apparently never transferred the lake. Then the company dissolved in 2019, and the parcel had simply been left behind.That meant three things:First, the HOA did not own the lake. There was no deed, no lease, no management agreement, no easement, no court order—nothing.Second, the HOA rule Phyllis had cited, Article 7.4, only applied to common areas, which the CC&Rs defined as land deeded to and maintained by the HOA. APN 2847 wasn't deeded to the HOA. So, by the HOA's own governing documents, it was not a common area.

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