This is where the case earns its place. The disputes were: records production, parking restrictions, association access to common areas at the owners' lot, and removal of a diseased ash tree.

What they generated: six years of litigation, more than 120 motions, an 11-day bench trial, two appeals, and a record of nearly 9,000 pages consisting almost entirely of the common-law record.

The owners' counterclaim included a Common Interest Community Association Act records count under 765 ILCS 160/1-1 et seq., and fiduciary-duty counts against three individual officers.

The proportionality problem, stated plainly

A diseased tree and a parking rule are not complicated. Neither side in this case will have recovered anything approaching what it spent, and the fine at issue — $10,100 — is a fraction of the fees now to be assessed on remand.

It is worth being direct about why this happens in community associations specifically. Two features make escalation unusually easy:

The parties cannot walk away. A commercial dispute ends when one side stops dealing with the other. Neighbours in a covenanted community keep living next to each other, and every subsequent violation notice is read against the last one.

One side spends other people's money. The association's litigation is funded by assessments, including those paid by the defendants. That is lawful and normal, and it means the board's cost discipline depends entirely on the board.

The CICAA records point, which boards routinely miss

The counterclaim ran under the Common Interest Community Association Act, not the Condominium Property Act. CICAA has its own records-inspection regime and its own fee-shifting, distinct from Section 19 of the Condominium Property Act.

Boards of non-condominium associations — townhome and single-family HOAs — frequently apply Section 19 analysis to a CICAA obligation, or assume they have no statutory records duty at all. Both are wrong, and the second is expensive: a records failure is the counterclaim that turns an enforcement action into a six-year case.

Note also that which statute governs is not always what the declaration says it is — an association exercising powers for the benefit of condominium unit owners is a master association under 765 ILCS 605/18.5(a) whatever its documents recite.

What a board can do

Set a cost threshold in advance. Before authorising litigation, decide what the association is prepared to spend, and require the board to revisit it explicitly rather than by default when the number is reached. Very few Illinois associations do this, and it is the single practice that would have prevented most of the year's worst outcomes.

And answer the records request. It is nearly always cheaper than defending the counterclaim.

What to watch next

The remand, where post-trial and appellate fees will be assessed — adding to a total that already dwarfs the underlying dispute.