A homeowners association in St. Peters, Missouri spent more than $31,000 in legal fees pursuing two neighbors over a fence, up from an annual legal budget of just $485 a few years earlier, roughly sixty times what the association had historically set aside for legal costs in a single year. And after all that spending, a judge sided with the homeowners anyway, pointing to something anyone driving down the same street could have noticed: a nearly identical fence sat directly across the road, on a property the HOA never touched.
The dispute centers on Tyler and Shana Taylor, whose property in the Bellemeade subdivision of St. Charles County backs onto Grand Teton Drive and sits along Bellemeade Drive on one side. In April 2020, the Taylors asked Bellemeade Homeowners Association for permission to build a fence along the Bellemeade Drive side yard. The association denied the request, then denied a follow-up variance request too. The Taylors built the fence anyway, enclosing their rear yard along Grand Teton and part of the side yard facing Bellemeade Drive. Two years later, on April 21, 2022, the HOA sued.
An escalating legal bill
According to reporting that aggregated Fox2Now’s original coverage, the association’s legal expenses climbed from $485 in 2020 to more than $31,000 by 2023, with one of its lawsuits alone racking up over $20,000 in legal costs while still unresolved. Former board member Sophia Sullivan-Eufinger resigned over the spending, telling reporters, “You’ve already lost. At some point you’ve got to stop the bleeding for this community.” The homeowners’ own attorney was blunter still, saying the matter “could have been easily resolved by granting a minor variance from the restrictions.”
The HOA’s attorney, Todd Billy, maintained that litigation was “the very last option” and that legal fees were recoverable under the association’s governing declaration. That declaration does, in fact, allow the prevailing party in an enforcement action to recover attorney’s fees and court costs, which became relevant once the case reached Missouri’s Court of Appeals.
The trial court sided with the Taylors, then got reversed
At trial, the judge found in favor of the Taylors and an intervening neighbor, Andrew Gilfoil, ruling that the fencing covenant was ambiguous as applied to their property and that Bellemeade had effectively waived its right to enforce it. Central to that ruling was the fact that roughly seven other properties in the subdivision had non-conforming fences that the HOA had never pursued, including, as reporting on the case highlighted, a home directly across the street from the Taylors with its own fenced-in side yard that no one at the association had ever flagged.
That selective enforcement was the heart of the homeowners’ defense, and it’s easy to see why: if a rule only gets enforced against two specific households while near-identical setups elsewhere in the neighborhood go untouched, it starts to look less like consistent governance and more like a dispute the board decided to make an example of.
Why the appeals court flipped the outcome
The Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, reversed the trial court’s decision in a ruling issued via CourtListener on November 28, 2025. The appellate panel found the fencing restriction unambiguous, holding it plainly requires fences to “start at the rear corners of the residence constructed” without exception. More importantly for the waiver argument, the court pointed to an anti-waiver clause in Bellemeade’s declaration stating that a decision not to enforce a rule “shall not be construed a waiver” of the right to enforce it later. Citing a Missouri Supreme Court precedent on the same issue, the appeals court ruled that clause protects associations from losing enforcement authority simply because they didn’t act consistently in the past, even when the inconsistency is as visible as a fence across the street.
Bellemeade was named the prevailing party and entitled to recover its attorney’s fees, though the appellate court sent that specific dollar figure back to the trial court to sort out. For the Taylors and Gilfoil, it means a fence dispute that started with a denied application in 2020 is still not fully resolved five years later, and could ultimately cost them money on top of removing the fence. For every other HOA board watching this case, the lesson cuts both ways: selective enforcement might survive a legal challenge if your governing documents have the right anti-waiver language, but that doesn’t make sixty times your normal legal budget a good use of association dues.
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