No one renewed it. No one called. No one sent a letter. The payments, which had been modest to begin with ($340 per month, adjusted once in 1997), simply stopped arriving. And when I called the development company's listed number, it had been disconnected. Harmon Ridge Properties had dissolved in 2011.
The HOA, which had been managing the subdivision since 2001, had apparently inherited the infrastructure arrangement the way people inherit furniture: without reading the documentation, without understanding what they had, and without any particular interest in finding out.
I had not pressed the issue. I want to be clear about that, too. I had continued to maintain the system because 61 families depended on it for heat and cooking, and I was not the kind of person who let a paperwork lapse become someone's emergency in January. But I had noted the expiration. I had noted the silence. And I had placed a copy of Easement Agreement Number 1988-0447 in the front pocket of the blue accordion folder I keep in the filing cabinet beside my grandfather's deed, where it waited with the patience of paper.
The Ridgeline Pines HOA had been in existence since 2001, when the original developer transferred community management to a resident board. For the first decade or so, it had been a functional, if unremarkable, organization: maintaining the common areas, enforcing parking rules, sending the occasional letter about fence heights. I had no particular relationship with it. My land did not fall within the HOA's jurisdiction, which was defined in the recorded CC&Rs as the platted lots within the Ridgeline Pines subdivision boundaries. And those boundaries did not include my 2.4-acre utility strip or any other portion of the Cutler property. I was not a member. I had never been a member. I had never received a welcome packet, or attended a meeting, or paid a single dollar in dues.
Diane Coulter had joined the board in 2019 and had become infrastructure compliance chair in early 2021—a position that had not previously existed. She had created it herself, according to my neighbor Warren Ell, who had lived in the subdivision since 1993 and who had the particular gift of knowing everything that happened within a half-mile radius of his front porch. Warren was the kind of man who remembered dates and names and the exact wording of things people said at meetings, and he had been keeping me loosely informed about HOA developments for years—not because I asked him to, but because he believed in what he called "keeping the record straight on both sides of the fence."
Warren told me sometime in the spring of 2022 that Diane had begun referring to the propane infrastructure as "HOA-managed community utilities" in board communications, and that she had circulated a memo to residents describing the distribution system as "association property under community stewardship." He sent me a copy of the memo. I read it once, put it in the accordion folder behind the easement agreement, and did not respond.
The first certified letter arrived in August of 2022. It cited what it called "unauthorized modifications to community utility infrastructure." I had replaced a corroded section of the distribution manifold that summer, a standard maintenance procedure that I had performed a dozen times over the years. The letter demanded that I submit documentation of any work performed on "HOA utility systems" within the past 24 months and cease all unauthorized access to community infrastructure pending board review. It was signed by Diane Coulter, Infrastructure Compliance Chair, Ridgeline Pines HOA.
I read it at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, the accordion folder open in front of me, the deed to the 2.4-acre utility strip resting on top of the stack. I was not angry. I was, if anything, curious: curious about the specific mechanism by which a homeowners association had concluded it had authority over a private utility installation on land it had never owned, never leased, and never paid a dollar to maintain. The letter contained no citation to any recorded instrument, no easement number, no deed reference, no plat designation—just the phrase "community utility infrastructure," repeated four times as if repetition were a form of title.