People ask me, after the story became public, why I waited. They ask with a tone that suggests I should have called the sheriff in August of 2015 with the bill in my hand. I have an answer for those people.
The law in Texas, and the law in most states that grew up on rural easements and private utilities, is a slow law. It rewards patience. It punishes anger.
A man who calls the sheriff with one bill and a few photographs may get the tap removed and little else. The contractor walks. The developer walks. The HOA, in due course, can hire a different contractor and try again somewhere else.
The slow law, by contrast, allows a man with a kitchen-table habit to build a case the size of an unabridged dictionary while the wrong people keep doing the wrong thing in front of him. The slow law makes possible the moment when a contractor in Atlanta, a developer in a rented house in Lakeway, and an HOA president on her own porch all wake up on the same Saturday morning with the same federal warrants on the same kitchen counter.
The fast law is satisfying for a week. The slow law is satisfying for the rest of your life.
I waited methodically. I documented every monthly bill from 2015 forward. I photographed the tap location every six months, from the same angle, at the same time of day, with the same camera. I filed quarterly notes with my attorney, Glenn Fontaine, who started a contingency case file in October 2015 and added to it patiently every quarter for thirty-six quarters. I made one trip to the Texas Public Utility Commission in 2017 to verify in person that my records were spotless. They were.
Spencer Roxborough sold the last lot in Sunset Mesa Estates in November 2016, moved back to Atlanta, and left the subdivision in the hands of a property management company that did the minimum required to keep the lights on.
The lights were on, technically, because my substation was keeping them on.
In 2022, a forty-six-year-old transplant from Houston named Vanessa Roxborough, Spencer's wife, was elected president of the Sunset Mesa Estates Homeowners Association. She and Spencer had moved into the largest house in the subdivision earlier that spring. Spencer was now what his LinkedIn called a "private real estate consultant." Vanessa was what her HOA Facebook described as "your devoted community president and proud Texas Hill Country neighbor."
She had been in office about ninety days when she filed her first nuisance complaint against me. It was about my tractor noise. The complaint was rejected by the Burnet County Clerk in three business days.
She filed another about my cattle. Rejected in two days. She filed a third about the industrial appearance of my equipment barn, which she could see from the back deck of her house.