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An Article
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Calaveras Man Fights Foreclosure
February 14, 2001
By
Diana Griego Erwin
Copyright ©2001 Sacramento Bee
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Dave Donnell, 46, a disabled man of ill health and no means, lives in a cabin. He's about to become homeless. Here's how it will happen:
The cabin in question is an aging, modest A-frame in Snowshoe Springs, just off Highway 4 in forested Calaveras County. Donnell has spent much of the past two years in hospitals and fell behind on paying his homeowners association dues. Now, the association board wants his house. Some people even say they seem intent on getting it.
To capture all the story's nuances, we have to go back 32 years in time, another board, another feeling. Donnell was 13 years old when his parents bought a forested parcel in a new development near Calaveras Big Trees State Park. They were the first family on their hill, and the quaint cabin they built was an escape from city life in Oakland, where Donnell's dad was a mailman and his mother worked for the city.
Donnell recalled how he and his two sisters loved trips to the cabin. He's a soft-spoken man with the slightest country drawl as he speaks of a boyhood of long, lazy days fishing and wading in the scenic Stanislaus River. His parents planned to retire there, but both died before that happened. Donnell inherited the cabin, and moved there in 1989 or so.
He worked at a ski resort and in warehouses and did odd jobs for neighbors. But the epilepsy that materialized in his teens became harder to manage and he developed chronic pancreatitis. Seizures resulted in the loss of driving privileges.
That's when Donnell fell behind on paying his association dues. A lien on his property followed, and the Snowshoe Homeowners Association voted to initiate its first-ever foreclosure. A former board member said they consulted with Weintraub, Genshlea & Sproul, a high-powered Sacramento law firm, to guide them through the process. Donnell has no attorney. (The board and its attorneys didn't return several phone calls from The Bee.)
In November, four months after deciding to foreclose, the board mailed a foreclosure policy to homeowners, something homeowners say they never voted on.. Whether associations can foreclose over dues is a legal question. In 1995, a Santa Rosa attorney successfully stopped the association at Sea Ranch from foreclosing on a property over $567 in unpaid dues.
Donnell attended the November board meeting to explain why he'd fallen so far behind. "Well, I've been sick before," a board member said, according to Donnell and a witness. Donnell also offered to pay $50 monthly installments. "That's all I could in any way squeeze together," he said. The response: too little, too late.
Homeowner Marjorie Murray Schaleger, a witness to all of this, quit the board in protest over Donnell's treatment. The cruel irony, said Schaleger, who has written an area history, is that Snowshoe Springs founder Rollen Waterson built the community as a mountain retreat ordinary people could afford. The first residents helped one another build their cabins. Waterson dreamed of a place that embraced the notion of community.
Schaleger admits the area is changing. Properties today are being snatched up by "dot-commers," she said, interested in building large vacation homes. Still, she thinks they'd be shocked by Donnell's story. No one attends board meetings, so no one knows what's going on, she said.
"They don't know him personally; they just see a bill," said Susan Winters, Donnell's neighbor. "I find it hard to believe that a homeowners association could take a man's basic possession, his home… . Yet for $2,000, they are foreclosing on him. Are any of us safe?"
In the midst of this, at the end of December, Donnell fell critically ill with unexplained internal bleeding doctors suspect may be an ulcer, he said. We're not talking a little bleeding. On New Year's Eve, his local hospital rushed him two hours away to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. In the past month, he's received 24 pints of blood. He was hospitalized again Friday night. Interestingly, despite the expense of medical care, neither doctors nor hospitals have moved to foreclose on him to collect the money owed them.
"Most people in this subdivision enjoy the luxury of two homes," said Winters, his neighbor. "Does that give (the association) the right to take his only home? I wonder if they also want his well-worn 1972 Chevy truck." |
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