Hot steaming mess (conclusion)
The 12-page gap on the aperture cards proved to be 12 pages of nothing but last will and testament. The guy had a lot of crap to unload. But luckily, the clerk at the desk that day proved to be the only clerk willing to ask exactly what I was looking for, and potentially the only clerk who knew exactly where on the "dark web" of Larimer County hidden records to find it.
Apparently (and this is good information for those who have previously looked in vain), there is a folder where stuff that was paper clipped to plats gets scanned and filed. The covenants for this particular neighborhood were still incorrectly indexed and not easily retrieved (either that or she was showing off), but she managed to track them down regardless.
Lo and behold, nothing in the covenants for this neighborhood about restrictions due to race and religion. Just standard boilerplate about how far back from the property line to build, restrictions on outdoor plumbing, no camping, harmonious color schemes, etc. One thing I did like about these covenants is how detailed they were about when these covenants expired, or, more explicitly, how they didn't.
Some of the other race-restricted and religion-restricted covenants I had come across in Estes Park neighborhoods appeared to have "expiration dates", generally, 20 or 25 years from the creation of the subdivision, all covenants appeared to "time out", although this made no sense to me - Outhouses, for example, were restricted for 25 years, and then after a certain date, you could put up as many as you wanted?
These apparent "expirations" give existing Estes Park HOA boards an excuse not to do anything to amend or update their offensive covenants. I wasn't legally sure if they had ever expired, and the detailed covenants I came across for the neighborhood that turned out not to have any discriminatory restrictions made it clear that, after the first "expiration date", the covenants automatically renewed each decade, unless or until a majority of the residents voted to remove or modify them. Interestingly enough, even though the neighborhood was not "stained", a new set of covenants written in 1994 would have wiped them clean even if they had been. That document explicitly removed from enforcement any and all covenants written prior to this set. Again, another example of how HOAs struggling with the best way to amend their race-restricted covenants might think about proceeding - Just detonate a flash pulse and start over.
The first person I went to when I found out this neighborhood was actually "clean" was the realtor who had assured me it wasn't. I don't remember if I got much of an apology (which demonstrates how I likely didn't), certainly I didn't witness a hand to the forehead "Ohmygosh, not Bubble Bottoms, I meant to say Crystal Forest" moment. It was more of a dismissive "Ugh, that was 20 years ago", as if any spew emerging from her mouth describing events prior to Y2K was naturally subject to embellishment and outright prevarication.
But here's the funny thing: It was as if she had sent me out to shoot someone in the head, and my bullet ended up not killing the person, but rather completely removing a previously undiagnosed malignant tumor, leaving clean margins and curing them from any future problems related to their cancer. So I actually ended up helping this neighborhood, in a strange sort of way, because it turned out they had also had great difficulty finding their early covenants, and their current lawyer needed them for other reasons unrelated to race or religion.
So the homeowners' association president tracked my name and address down through the newspaper (somehow she thought I represented a local newspaper, and one editor she called was only too happy to set her straight, informing me at the same time that I had been added to yet another group's shit list), and her lawyer phoned and offered me $10 for copies of the covenants I had found, because he had already paid a title company for 45 minutes of fruitless searching.
First honest money I've ever made researching Estes Park's history.
On top of that, I had independently started sending out feelers for possible living relatives of the original developer of this neighborhood, and one hit gave me priceless information about this man's early childhood, his general philosophy (conservative, but unlikely to be overtly racist or anti-Semitic) and his design of the roads in this neighborhood, which didn't require filling out endless paperwork or attending county planning sessions, but involved the use of a bulldozer and a crude drawing of what had been designated as "roads" presented to the commissioners post fact.
Apparently (and this is good information for those who have previously looked in vain), there is a folder where stuff that was paper clipped to plats gets scanned and filed. The covenants for this particular neighborhood were still incorrectly indexed and not easily retrieved (either that or she was showing off), but she managed to track them down regardless.
Lo and behold, nothing in the covenants for this neighborhood about restrictions due to race and religion. Just standard boilerplate about how far back from the property line to build, restrictions on outdoor plumbing, no camping, harmonious color schemes, etc. One thing I did like about these covenants is how detailed they were about when these covenants expired, or, more explicitly, how they didn't.
Some of the other race-restricted and religion-restricted covenants I had come across in Estes Park neighborhoods appeared to have "expiration dates", generally, 20 or 25 years from the creation of the subdivision, all covenants appeared to "time out", although this made no sense to me - Outhouses, for example, were restricted for 25 years, and then after a certain date, you could put up as many as you wanted?
These apparent "expirations" give existing Estes Park HOA boards an excuse not to do anything to amend or update their offensive covenants. I wasn't legally sure if they had ever expired, and the detailed covenants I came across for the neighborhood that turned out not to have any discriminatory restrictions made it clear that, after the first "expiration date", the covenants automatically renewed each decade, unless or until a majority of the residents voted to remove or modify them. Interestingly enough, even though the neighborhood was not "stained", a new set of covenants written in 1994 would have wiped them clean even if they had been. That document explicitly removed from enforcement any and all covenants written prior to this set. Again, another example of how HOAs struggling with the best way to amend their race-restricted covenants might think about proceeding - Just detonate a flash pulse and start over.
The first person I went to when I found out this neighborhood was actually "clean" was the realtor who had assured me it wasn't. I don't remember if I got much of an apology (which demonstrates how I likely didn't), certainly I didn't witness a hand to the forehead "Ohmygosh, not Bubble Bottoms, I meant to say Crystal Forest" moment. It was more of a dismissive "Ugh, that was 20 years ago", as if any spew emerging from her mouth describing events prior to Y2K was naturally subject to embellishment and outright prevarication.
But here's the funny thing: It was as if she had sent me out to shoot someone in the head, and my bullet ended up not killing the person, but rather completely removing a previously undiagnosed malignant tumor, leaving clean margins and curing them from any future problems related to their cancer. So I actually ended up helping this neighborhood, in a strange sort of way, because it turned out they had also had great difficulty finding their early covenants, and their current lawyer needed them for other reasons unrelated to race or religion.
So the homeowners' association president tracked my name and address down through the newspaper (somehow she thought I represented a local newspaper, and one editor she called was only too happy to set her straight, informing me at the same time that I had been added to yet another group's shit list), and her lawyer phoned and offered me $10 for copies of the covenants I had found, because he had already paid a title company for 45 minutes of fruitless searching.
First honest money I've ever made researching Estes Park's history.
On top of that, I had independently started sending out feelers for possible living relatives of the original developer of this neighborhood, and one hit gave me priceless information about this man's early childhood, his general philosophy (conservative, but unlikely to be overtly racist or anti-Semitic) and his design of the roads in this neighborhood, which didn't require filling out endless paperwork or attending county planning sessions, but involved the use of a bulldozer and a crude drawing of what had been designated as "roads" presented to the commissioners post fact.
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