That slope detail is going to matter. Write it down.
The HOA at Millbrook Pines wasn't always a problem. For the first couple of years, it was the usual stuff: reminder letters about grass height, a passive-aggressive newsletter, a rule about lights coming down before February. Annoying, manageable.
The board changed in year three, and that's when Constance Drewry entered our lives.
Constance was 62, retired from some kind of middle-management HR position, and she'd found in the HOA presidency the power she'd apparently been building toward her whole career. She was the type who knew the exact page number of every covenant in the community guidelines. She drove a pearl white Cadillac Escalade with the Millbrook Pines HOA magnet on the door—yes, an actual magnetic placard, like she was a volunteer deputy. And she wore reading glasses on a beaded chain even when she didn't need them, just so she could peer over them at you. You know the type.
The first unfair act happened in March, two years after Constance took over. The HOA had approved a landscaping project around the clubhouse: a big flagstone patio, new drainage infrastructure, the works. Pretty standard.
What they did not announce at any meeting, in any newsletter, was that the new drainage system would route excess stormwater runoff from the clubhouse's impervious surfaces—the parking lot, the patio—through a PVC pipe that terminated at the edge of the community's common area, which happened to border my back fence.
The first rain after that installation, I walked outside and found my yard, my vegetable beds, my kids' old sandbox, the patch of clover I'd been nursing for the bees, under two inches of standing brown water. It smelled like wet clay and diesel. The water had a faint orange tint from the iron in the soil. My boots sank to the ankle with a sound like someone pulling a cork out of a wine bottle—that sucking, squelching sound. I'll never forget it.
I took photos. I filed a complaint with the HOA.
I got a letter back two weeks later, signed by Constance, informing me that the drainage system had been installed in accordance with all applicable HOA guidelines, and that routine stormwater management was not grounds for a formal grievance. Routine stormwater management, as if my yard were a retention ditch.
Denise told me to let it go.
Our neighbor down the street, an older gentleman named Theo Baskin, who'd been in the neighborhood for 20 years and had watched three HOA boards come and go, told me to document everything.