I pulled the box down from the shelf that evening, sat at the kitchen table, and went through the notebooks one by one, marking the relevant entries with small paper clips: every instance of maintenance I had performed on the tank, the manifold, the supply lines, the regulator assembly, the pressure relief valves. There were 214 such entries over 31 years. I did not count them that night; I counted them later when Patricia asked me to compile a summary, and the number surprised even me.
What I was looking for, and what I found without much difficulty, was the maintenance record for the period after the easement expired in September of 2013. Because if the HOA was going to argue that it had been maintaining the system, the maintenance logs told a different story: a precise, dated, initialed, undeniable story written in my own hand, in the same pencil, in the same notebooks, on the same shelf where they had always been.
The HOA had not replaced a valve, had not adjusted a regulator, had not performed a single documented inspection. I had done all of it, every time, without asking permission and without sending an invoice, because 61 families needed heat and because that was the kind of person I was.
That, Patricia told me when I described what I had found, was going to be the center of the case.
She filed a petition in county court in the spring of 2023 seeking a declaratory judgment that the Ridgeline Pines HOA held no recorded or cognizable legal interest in the utility infrastructure located on parcel number 14-47-A, the 2.4-acre utility strip deeded to Garrett Raymond Cutler and recorded in the county recorder's office in 1991.
The petition cited the original homestead deed, the 1947 mineral and utility rights agreement, the 1991 recorded deed, Easement Agreement Number 1988-0447 and its recorded expiration, and the absence of any subsequent recorded instrument. It attached a certified copy of the county plat showing the subdivision boundary and the utility parcel as distinct parcels with distinct ownership. It attached a title search going back to 1939—clean and unbroken, every transfer recorded, every instrument numbered, every boundary described in metes and bounds that matched the ground within a fraction of a degree.
Gerald Foss filed a response on behalf of the HOA. It reasserted the prescriptive easement theory and added a new argument: that the HOA had been paying for the propane service to its residents, and that this payment constituted a form of consideration establishing an implied contract for continued use of the infrastructure.
Patricia noted in her reply brief that paying for propane delivery—the gas itself, purchased from a commercial supplier—was not the same as paying for the use of the land or the infrastructure, and that no payment of any kind had been made to the owner of the land since the easement payments ceased in 2013, a period of nearly 10 years during which the HOA had apparently concluded that the land, the tank, the manifold, and the distribution system had simply become theirs by virtue of continued use and creative nomenclature.