But it turned up enough small, sloppy recordkeeping that the new board voted without a single dissenting voice to digitize and publicly archive every maintenance record going forward, searchable by any resident at any time.
It wasn't a dramatic gesture.
It didn't undo anything that had already happened.
But it meant that the next time somebody's dog refused to walk across a patch of grass, whoever owned that dog wouldn't have to spend four months building a case from scratch just to get someone to take them seriously.
The corporate successor to Halverson Agricultural Holdings, having funded the full remediation as part of its settlement, also agreed under continued state pressure, and facing the reputational cost of a case that had already made regional news, to fund independent environmental testing at every other property nationwide that could be traced through its corporate lineage to a legacy Halverson reclamation site.
Three additional sites were identified in neighboring counties.
Two came back clean.
One, beneath a since-abandoned rail yard with no residential development nearby, was flagged for future monitoring.
Diane Prescott faced formal charges related to unauthorized use of HOA funds and knowing concealment of an environmental hazard.
Charges that carried the possibility of both financial restitution and a permanent bar from serving on any homeowners association board in the state.
Carla Marchetti, cooperating fully from the outset, reached a settlement requiring significant financial restitution but avoided criminal prosecution.
A distinction the county attorney's office made clear was directly tied to the difference between the two women's choices.
One had inherited a decades-old secret and quietly maintained it out of what she'd call, in her own defense, a misguided instinct to avoid panic.
The other had been told everything in full, with time to make a different decision, and had chosen instead to pay for silence in the middle of the night.
I ran into Diane exactly once after the board removed her.
At the grocery store on the edge of the neighborhood.
Both of us reaching for the same brand of coffee filters at the same time.
She looked older than she had at that first meeting.
The composure that used to fill up every room she walked into was nowhere to be found.
She didn't apologize.
I hadn't expected her to.
What she said instead, quietly, almost to herself as much as to me, was that she genuinely believed, right up until the night she authorized that midnight patch job, that it would hold long enough for the problem to become someone else's to solve.
A future board.
A future homeowner.
Anyone but her.
I didn't have anything comforting to say back to that, so I didn't try.