LYNDEN — The sand traps at the Homestead Farms Golf Course are barely recognizable as such — visible from the patios of many residents in the adjacent Lynden subdivision, the bunkers are rocky and filled in with weeds, untouched by golfers and grazed over by a large flock of migratory wigeons. On the course, which has been closed since August 2023, the greens are fuzzy with grass growth and dotted with thistles, and the ponds are succumbing to cattails.
“It makes me want to cry,” said Ada Wiersma, 88, who has lived in Homestead for 25 years and used to golf regularly with her late husband, Don. Her backyard abuts the course and she can watch from her breakfast nook as waterfowl enjoy the untended links.
The deterioration of the 18-hole course is the most conspicuous reminder of a class action lawsuit over open space maintenance fees that has spanned nearly five years, caused rifts in the community, ended without clear resolution and has now been appealed to the Washington Supreme Court.
The parties entangled in the lawsuit — the golf course owner, the management company, the City of Lynden, the plaintiffs, the class members and the intervenors — have spent millions on legal costs, while the sale of the course, listed for $3 million in 2021, has been hindered by litigation.
An abrupt fee increase
Platted in 1992, the north Lynden planned residential development grew to include more than 600 houses and condominiums clustered around the private golf course. In addition to the golf course, Homestead has just under 9 acres of common open space, mostly small landscaped areas.
The subdivision is governed by a master declaration with covenants, conditions and restrictions, but has no homeowners association, in violation of the City of Lynden’s code, which gives control of common open space to an elected HOA.
The Homestead litigation saga began in 2019 when the common area maintenance fees charged to property owners of the development increased from $36 to $93 a month, a steep jump that shocked many owners.
MJ Management, the local company that managed the course for Canadian ownership company 18 Paradise, was responsible for upkeep in the large neighborhood, and claimed years of deferred maintenance meant more money was needed to improve the development’s common open space, from street lamps to sidewalks.
The company not only raised the maintenance fees multiple times, but also amended the subdivision covenants to allow for annual fee increases and special assessments.
Homestead residents convened a series of meetings in late 2019 and early 2020 to get some answers. The meetings became “pretty boisterous,” Steve Zehm remembered.
Zehm is one of 11 representative plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit against 18 Paradise and MJ Management. An avid golfer, he purchased a Homestead property in 2009.
“It breaks my heart that it’s in the shape it’s in,” Zehm said about the golf course, which 18 Paradise shuttered unceremoniously in 2023 due to the lawsuit. Not only is the course sprouting weeds, it is also guarded by “no trespassing” signs to keep Homestead walkers off the golf cart pathways.
The course once attracted many Canadian visitors and hosted national-caliber tournaments, said Matt Skinner, a former Lynden High School golf coach and one of the Homestead lawsuit intervenors (someone who was not named in the suit but has a stake in the outcome). With the closure of the course, student-athletes at Lynden High, Lynden Christian and Nooksack Valley now must drive to practice at courses across Whatcom County.
Choosing sides
In May 2020, a group of property owners filed their first complaint, alleging MJ Management, 18 Paradise and its owner, Vancouver developer Mao Hua “Morris” Chen, had violated consumer protection and civil racketeering laws.
In November 2020 the case was certified as a class action, with the class defined as every lot and condominium owner in Homestead. Owners had the ability to opt out if they did not wish to be involved in the lawsuit.
Plaintiff Sonja Lyons, who has lived in a Homestead senior community, Island Green Commons, since 2018, said she’s participating in the lawsuit because she wants to help protect the interests of the people in her condo complex.
“I really believe we need to have voting rights over our fees and how they’re spent,” Lyons said during an interview in November 2024.
A small group of residents who opted out of the class action and felt their interests were not being represented joined the proceedings in 2023 as intervenors. They were concerned the common open spaces, ponds and golf course weren’t being maintained, while the ongoing litigation was “contributing to the decline of the property, both physically and monetarily.”
Maureen Dowling, a spritely 70-year-old, leads the intervenors because she’s worried the residents of Homestead, especially the many seniors who live there, are being taken advantage of or misled by lawyers who she thinks are looking for a big payout from the class action.
“This has been a money grab from the very beginning,” Skinner added. “Every one of the appeals they’ve filed have to do with money.”
The plaintiffs don’t feel that’s a fair characterization of their motives.
“They’ve been casting aspersions on us and our lawyers, engaging in ad hominem attacks,” Lyons said about the intervenors. “They think the lawyers are leading us around by the nose and want all this money. Well, they deserve to get paid for the work they’re doing. But we are not stupid.”
“I could care less about monetary gain — I want justice for homeowners,” Zehm said.
Both parties operate their own websites, posting updates on the lawsuit and lobbing thinly-veiled criticism at the opposing side. The “Our Homestead Lynden” site, run by the intervenors, calls the maintenance fees reasonable and paints a picture of what Homestead could be, under new ownership that commits to taking care of the common open space again.
The plaintiffs’ “Homestead Parcel Owners” site explains their grievances, advocates for an independent HOA and encourages contributions to the trust fund set up to support the cost of litigation. In September 2023, a Whatcom County judge issued a temporary restraining order (and levied a $24,000 fine) to force the plaintiffs to remove confidential documents from the website.
A complicated legal battle
The litigation, with its myriad contested motions and amended complaints, took four years to wend its way through a court system that was experiencing a severe backlog due to COVID-19 limitations. Attempts were made to settle, but each side blames the other’s intransigence for a lack of compromise.
The City of Lynden was named as a defendant in the lawsuit for failing to enforce its planned residential development ordinance that requires a homeowners association, but was dismissed from the case in 2022. After its dismissal, Mayor Scott Korthuis, along with the city’s legal counsel and planning department, sent a letter explaining its stance to the plaintiffs.
One of the reasons the city did not become involved in the development’s HOA was because, according to the letter, Homestead “appeared to function smoothly from 1992 until recently in 2020, when complaints were raised by homeowners.”
MJ Management was effectively dismissed later in 2022, although the company and its two owners found themselves drawn back into the case thanks to ensuing actions by the plaintiffs. The business partners were again dismissed by the court in March 2024, when Whatcom Superior Court Judge David Freeman ruled that the Consumer Protection Act had not been violated.
After a two-week-long bench trial in spring 2024 and a few more rounds of motions, Freeman issued a ruling in July and a final order in October. The judge nullified the two amendments to the master declaration and the $57 maintenance fee increase, which the plaintiffs considered a win. He also ruled that the development must have an HOA but wrote it was not the court’s duty “to opine further on how to establish a homeowners association here.”
In a phone call with Cascadia Daily News, MJ Management’s attorney Jeffrey Possinger described Homestead as “one of the more complicated cases I’ve ever worked on.”
Freeman echoed that description during yet another motion hearing in November 2024, saying that the Homestead case will likely change the way the court does business in the future.
“This stretched our county to the limit as far as what it could handle because we are a small bench and quite honestly, I’m looking at ways that, as the judge for water adjudication, how we can identify cases like this that do have this complexity,” Freeman said. “Certainly there was complexity to a number of claims the plaintiffs brought that hopefully in the future we can streamline quicker, because the community deserves that despite our limitations.”
After the court’s ruling, the plaintiffs and MJ Management each sought unsuccessfully to have the opposing party cover their attorneys’ fees, a sum that totaled more than $1.6 million and did not include the costs incurred by owner 18 Paradise, the intervenors or the City of Lynden.
The appeal
While the case had stuttered to a close in fall 2024, the plaintiffs didn’t feel any sense of resolution or justice. There was no plan for returning the maintenance fees to property owners, there was no clear path to establishing an HOA, the golf course was still in disrepair, and various residents and condominium associations were still maintaining common open spaces at their own expense.
“It seems a little wishy-washy, what the judge said,” Lyons said.
So they decided to appeal it to the Washington Supreme Court, and brought all the previously-dismissed parties, including MJ Management’s individual owners and the city, back into the case.
“We the homeowners have absolutely zero voice, so any grievance that comes up, we have to try and contact the owner or the owner’s agent and that has not been fruitful at all. In fact, it led to this mess,” class member Lynn Button said after the appeal was filed. “My best case scenario is the owner of the golf course, the City of Lynden and the homeowners come together and figure out the best scenario.”
The intervenors, on the other hand, are less interested in forming an official governing HOA — they’d rather see someone local buy and reopen the golf course.
At one point, their ideal candidate was Lynden business owner Duane Scholten and his son, former Homestead golf pro Willy Scholten. The 153-acre golf course and pro shop were listed for sale for $3 million in 2021 and Scholten made a full-price offer, but the sale was tied to the resolution of the lawsuit and never went through.
More recently, seller’s agent Patrick Starr of John L. Scott Real Estate has been fielding inquiries from other parties interested in buying Homestead Farms Golf Course. After the judge ruled on the case in October 2024, he was approached by a group of buyers who were prepared to restore and reopen the course by spring 2025. They knew the state of the course and its history, and had spoken with the city and community members, Starr said.
The buyers and seller agreed to a price over the first weekend of November and were nearing completion of the deal, but Starr knew the 30-day clock was still ticking on an appeal. Then, on the afternoon of Nov. 4, 2024, on the last day and in the final hours that an appeal could be filed, it happened. Because of the resulting uncertainty, the buyers couldn’t go forward with the quick close they had negotiated.
“The buyers are still here,” Starr said in January. “If the appeal isn’t heard, maybe the course will be up and running by spring. If it drags out for another year or two years …” He didn’t finish the thought.
The appeal almost didn’t make it into the system in time — while the plaintiffs had filed within 30 days of the final ruling, an unprecedented statewide court system outage caused the file to be transmitted to the state Supreme Court after the deadline. On the last day of 2024, the issue was ironed out.
As of Jan. 8, the Supreme Court had not yet set a date for when it will decide whether the appeal will be retained or transferred to the Court of Appeals, which is the more conventional venue for an appeal.
Intervenor Dowling said she doesn’t plan to continue fighting through the appeal. The effort has been expensive and time-consuming.
“This has been my life for five years,” she said. “I’m ready to hand it off to the next person who’s willing to represent the homeowners.”
The case has been personal for her, in ways the lawyers don’t understand.
“Their battleground is our home,” Dowling said. “We come home to a deteriorating golf course and people won’t talk to us who used to be our friends. It’s divided the entire community.”
Plaintiff Lyons doesn’t agree with that assessment.
“I have heard one person say, ‘It’s torn our community apart and people don’t talk to each other.’ Well, I have not experienced that,” Lyons said. “I think people actually were very happy when we got the court to roll the fee back to $36 a month so we could all breathe a sigh of relief and just figure things out without being concerned about that $93.”
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.