The court set a hearing date for the following October.
Warren called me a few days after the petition was filed and served on the HOA. He had been at a board meeting the previous evening. He attended them regularly, he said, as a matter of civic habit and personal entertainment, and he described what had happened when Gerald Foss explained the situation to the full board.
Diane Coulter had reportedly told the room that the lawsuit was a "negotiating tactic" and that the association would "defend its infrastructure rights aggressively." Several board members had asked questions that suggested they were hearing for the first time that the land under the tank did not belong to the HOA. One of them had asked where the deed was. Diane had said the deed was "a matter of historical record that the association's legal counsel was reviewing." Gerald Foss, Warren said, had not looked entirely comfortable.
"She still thinks she's going to win," Warren said.
"I know," I said.
"Does she understand what happens to 61 households if she does?"
I had thought about that. I had thought about it carefully, and I want to be honest about what I concluded, because it matters to how I understood my own position in all of this.
Those 61 families had not done anything wrong. They had bought homes in a subdivision and trusted that the infrastructure serving those homes was properly arranged, which was a reasonable thing to trust. They were not my adversaries. They were, in a meaningful sense, my neighbors, even if the fence line between us was also a legal boundary. Whatever happened in the courtroom, I had no intention of leaving anyone without heat.