On November 3, 2025, your Board of Directors sued a member of the association — “as a representative of any members who may share her position” — this in your new attorney’s own words.
That is not my characterization. It is paragraph 2 of the complaint they filed (Exhibit 1, court-stamped). If you believe owners here should continue to enjoy the same rights and consumer protections we have always had, this lawsuit is aimed at you too — you are “DOES 1 through 50.” I’ll wager there are a lot more Does than that. Nobody asked Brian Keating to spend over $90,000 on stripping the owners of their civil rights when we have other, far more urgent uses for that money. Relieving “the burden” of being a Director was not one of them.
One point of contention is simple: owners have rights, while Directors have obligations that govern them just as much as they govern us. Nevertheless, without seeking your permission or approval, they have spent upwards of $90,000 of your dues money — on “your behalf” — to strip you of civil-code protections you have enjoyed for the last 40 years of our operation, since inception in 1985.
From the Directors’ position, their personal doubt about whether “we the owners” qualify for these protections — or deserve them — was reason enough to file a lawsuit against us to remove them. And so, without a vote or a public conversation, they filed against their own membership: through me as the named party, with the rest of you cast as Does 1–50.
I bring Brian Keating’s name to your attention in particular, because he is the President and decision-maker under whom this happened. Spending your money on an offensive lawsuit against an owner who simply stood up to advocate for the lawful processes agreed to at purchase, as outlined in our Bylaws — processes the Directors are elected to uphold — that abandonment is, in my view, a breach of the fiduciary duty they owe to every owner. My cross-complaint, on file with the court, formally alleges as much (Exhibit 5). I hope you will take time to browse this website and ask yourself why you never heard about any of this, when you are just as much a target of their lawsuit as I am.
In 2023, after two years of failed elections, I petitioned the Directors for Internal Dispute Resolution so we could have a conversation about lowering quorum. The Directors refused their obligation under Article VIII of the Bylaws and refused to resolve the quorum conflict — a conflict that can perpetually enable them to appoint directors rather than have them freely elected, whenever the owners fail to meet the 25% threshold, as happens regularly. That quorum struggle leads directly to election manipulation and cronyism. This is how the Ranch finds itself in decay: when new owners get appointed to top offices within months of buying a share — because of who they know, not what they know. From 2018 through 2025 — eight straight years — the annual election either failed for lack of quorum, went uncontested, or was not held at all; 2024 required a court’s intervention to stand; and the 2025 election “succeeded” only after a court ordered the quorum requirement drastically reduced — a process that took five months, plus legal fees for the petition. Year by year, the appointment habit became more and more relied upon — comfortable, and cheaper than holding an election where you get to choose your leaders.
At the end of February 2025, some of your incumbent directors (led by Brian Keating) decided that following civil law was burdensome and should be abandoned in favor of something less accountable to the owners. That word is not mine either:
By filing on me — on US — they are asking a judge to decide for you — what you bought, what you own, and whether the rights that came with it are still yours. You should not have to fund lawyers to ask a court what the Directors could have read, with little effort, in their own purchase and governance documents. Instead, Case No. 25CI-000260, filed in Tehama County Superior Court by the Association’s outside law firm, asks a court to declare that the Davis-Stirling Act — the California law that has protected owners at R-Wild Horse Ranch for 40 years — no longer applies here. Secret ballots. Independent election oversight. Restrictions on how your money gets spent, and your right to inspect the books. Transparent, open meetings that are enforceable in small claims court. Those are what the case is about — all of it on the chopping block.
Every dollar spent on that lawsuit is dues money. Your rights are the target — and they authorized that you should pay for that privilege of disenfranchisement.
Don’t take my word for it — the documents speak for themselves: the complaint their lawyers filed, and the Board’s own minutes and emails announcing a sudden — even instant — change of position, made at the very meeting where the statutes of the Davis-Stirling Act had just seated them as Board members. Let the state records show what this Association has been for four decades. The files tell the story better than I can.