Crosstimber Chronicle

Welcome back, neighbor!

To continue our saga, remember we left off with the unsettling discovery that our creepy little troll-like AirBnB host, Tyrone, was refusing to stop operation of his illegal rental “hotel” in our midst. So…..

The HOA board that still existed at the time finally did what the letters had failed to do and filed a lawsuit to enforce the CC&Rs. The response from the drunk California ex-cop contingent (with the Sleazy Sacramento Contractor as their de-facto leader) was predictable and escalatory. Board members who had signed on to the suit or simply refused to drop it found themselves targeted more aggressively. Some resigned. Some left the Ranch. The ones who stayed discovered that the next annual meeting somehow produced a new board majority composed of this same California contingent and their allies. How the votes and proxies arranged themselves that way remains a matter of local shame and embarrassment for those Patagonia Posers and the Mormon pill popper I have mentioned in other posts.

The new HOA board moved to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the previous, upstanding board. They found a judge willing to do it, and to do it with prejudice. The story that circulates is that the judge was not at his sharpest that day. Originally the judge ruled to allow the dismissal but WITHOUT prejudice, so that any future HOA board could bring a suit against Tyrone if they so desired, which is just in keeping with the CC&Rs. But the judge foolishly appointed the defense attorney, a greasy, fat-encrusted man named Trevor Hart, to type up the verbal ruling into an official order. Trevor, in a very dirty trick, worded the order to falsely state the dismissal was WITH prejudice, to serve his client’s ends. The Friday before Memorial Day weekend around noon was when the judge got around to signing his monthly pile of orders and he, being lazy and (rumor has it) possibly hung over, didn’t bother to read the order to realize it did not at all reflect his ruling before signing it and distributing it. He later dug in his heels, likely out of professional embarrassment. You see, this judge had just been appointed to a federal position (he would later lose) by the Governor. This appointment was basically as a nepotistic favor since this judge’s older brother, a District Attorney who had been talented and beloved by the people, had just kicked the can a month before. Anyway, Judge “Drinkwater” tried to insist that individual residents could “still sue Tyrone on their own dime if they wanted to!” without addressing his massive error at all. One wonders what the point of paying close to a thousand dollars a year in HOA dues is if our HOA is now powerless to enforce it’s own rules because of this judge’s heinous mistake? Should we ask him to pay our dues?

Whether alcohol was the decisive factor or merely an aggravating one with this judge’s behavior on a Friday (because I have heard such rumors – just rumors, mind you and all allegedly), the order went down. The case was gone. The CC&Rs that prohibited the trailer, the barn residence, the whole-house and room-by-room short-term rentals, and the mini-hotel layout itself were left effectively unenforceable against Tyrone. The HOA’s tiny legal fund had been depleted. Tyrone seemed to blame the HOA for this instead of himself, the very person breaking the rules and requiring the HOA board take action. The only good news is most of the neighbors were too stupid to actually understand any of this and thus succumbed to paranoid mis-direction by the new HOA board full of the California thugs and posers. So these neighbors have no idea how screwed they really were by Tyrone and Trevor and the judge — and even the attorney representing the HOA.

The original HOA board members from 2022 that did the right thing understood the matter, obviously, but they have moved away and rumor has it are much happier, as I think I’ve mentioned wistfully. I have tried in vain to get in contact with them to get some inside information. Since they have been completely vindicated in these ensuing years, I would think they would relish visiting Crosstimber to gloat a little, but I’ve heard nothing back.

To this day, Tyrone Stool has not thought to repay the HOA the tens of thousands of dollars in lost legal fees, even though everybody is aware that the case would have been a slam dunk and he would have lost on the merits. Occasionally, Tyrone will, out of shame or guilt, use a back hoe to try and fill the large pot holes on the Loop road caused by the heavy traffic from his customers. Mr. Sleazy from Sacramento makes a big deal on Facebook about the outstanding civic contribution of his bosom buddy Mr. Stool. Of course, the potholes return after the first rain because Tyrone doesn’t actually know how to repair potholes. Or he will volunteer to fix a neighbor’s HVAC system, since that was supposedly his bailiwick, only to have the entire system need to be replaced after his attempted repair. One wonders if he moved willingly to Garden Valley, or was run out of Detroit on a rail, tarred and feathered by his former customers.

Residents who still live here understand the practical outcome. Crosstimber Ranch now contains an illegal rental hotel that the association cannot stop. New batches of strangers arrive most weekends. The doorbell cameras and security lights that went up during the fight have stayed up. The neighbors who could leave have largely left. Those who remain either accept the situation, profit from similar arrangements of their own, or keep their heads down.

It’s also worth noting that the attorney the HOA hired to dismiss the case, (a local yokel who will be the feature of an entire post all to himself), behaved just as badly as Tyrone’s defense attorney – by blatantly mis-representing Idaho law to the judge at the dismissal hearing – effectively working against the interests of his client the HOA members. This attorney only submitted the first half of the first sentence of a law that restricts the creation of new bans on rental operations unless the homeowner signs off on the ban. The second half of the first sentence in the law specifically states that if the homeowner has already signed a rental ban, then that ban is in effect and the renting is illegal. Well, the Crosstimber Ranch CC&Rs have two provisions, Section 3.1 and 3.27, that specifically address and ban Tyron’s type of rental operation Anyone buying property in Crosstimber Ranch must sign the CC&Rs. Of course, as we all know, Tyrone had already signed and agreed to abide by the CC&Rs back in 2018 when he bought his property. The attorney purposefully omitted that part of the law when he spoke directly to the judge and in what he submitted in writing. I’m sure he will live to regret that unethical move in increasing ways as time goes by even more than the judge will regret his lazy mistakes. These current and future regrets, however, have changed nothing about Tyrone’s hotel on the ridge or the ruined condition of the subdivision below it.

This is how one of the more determined invasive species operates here: acquire the lot, build the structure that violates the rules, occupy the property in prohibited ways while monetizing it, recruit the existing California contingent for muscle and process, outlast or displace the people still willing to enforce the rules, and leave behind a permanent commercial use that the remaining residents can neither reverse nor ignore. The CC&Rs still exist on paper. The ability to apply them to this particular lot does not. Everyone else gets to live with the result. Congratulations to the neighbors who sat on the sidelines and let it happen because they wanted to be invited to the hot tub parties or were too busy to actually read the CC&R’s themselves and believed what they were told by the drunken California cabal.

But, on the bright side, rumor has it that the young lady (and others) who moved away that year are happier than they have ever been, especially when they get news of how miserable, bored and broken down Tyrone and all the ex-cops, male Karens, Patagonia Posers and Meridiass Moronis have become.

Karma is going to karma, one way or the other.

— ONWARD

All satire, all the time, all for fun around here.