Hyde v. Aero Valley Prop. Owners Ass'n

CHARLES GLEN HYDE; CANDACE L. HYDE; DREAMSHIPS, INC.;HYDE-WAY, INC.; AND TEXAS AIR CLASSICS, INC., Appellants v. AERO VALLEY PROPERTY OWNERS ASSOCIATION, INC., Appellee

No. 02-20-00416-CV

Court of Appeals Second Appellate District of Texas at Fort Worth

June 17, 2021

On Appeal from the 16th District Court Denton County, Texas

Trial Court No. 20-6359-16

Before Sudderth, C.J.; Birdwell and Bassel, JJ.

Memorandum Opinion by Justice Bassel MEMORANDUM OPINION

I. Introduction

We feel like a reader who has been dropped in the middle of a plot portraying a legal dispute as long and complicated as the litigation depicted in Dickens's Bleak House and who is then asked to sort out Bleak House's plot when most of the book's sixty-seven chapters have been ripped out. The plot in this case is centered on a conflict for control of a private airport development where the property owners in the development have access to the airport's runway and pay fees to maintain its common areas. The focus of the conflict has been who controls the airport's management and who has the right to collect the assessments charged to the property owners. This conflict has continued for over thirty-five years.

Many have been involved in the story over its history, but the plot has now evolved into a clash between two characters. The first character is Appellant Charles Glen Hyde.¹ Hyde's role comes in part from the ownership of the airport's runway; he claims that he controls management of the airport's operation and that he has the right to collect assessments from the property owners in certain areas of the development in order to fund the airport's operation. The second character is Appellee Aero Valley Property Owners Association, Inc. (POA), which stands as Hyde's nemesis and which claims that it has the right to control the management ofthe airport and the right to assess and collect fees from the property owners. The plot's evolution has produced no clear winner because of the inconsistent restriction schemes that govern the various tracts in the airport development. A previous effort by the POA to impose order by amending the restriction schemes to make them uniform and to give the POA a clear right of control failed when our court held in an appeal from a prior suit that the new restrictions had not been properly adopted. See Hyde v. Nw. Reg'l Airport Prop. Owners Ass'n, 583 S.W.3d 644, 651 (Tex. App.—Fort Worth 2018, pet. denied).

We have limited insight into how the plot has evolved. The present interlocutory appeal is from a temporary-injunction order entered in a recently filed lawsuit that the POA brought to obtain a determination of its rights to manage the airport. All we know of the conflict's history comes from the testimony and a smattering of exhibits introduced during a short temporary-injunction hearing. Though the parties suggest that we should forecast how the story will end, we have neither the information, nor the need, to do so. Our role in refereeing the contest at its present stage is limited because all we decide in this interlocutory appeal from a temporary-injunction order is whether the trial court abused its discretion by imposing restraints on Hyde's actions until this matter reaches a resolution on the merits. We can resolve that question on more narrow grounds than testing the merits of the parties' contentions.

The trial court's temporary-injunction order generally restrains Hyde from interfering with (1) the POA's management of the airport, (2) efforts of the property owners or their contractors to repair or improve their properties, (3) attempts by the property owners to sell or market their properties (strictly prohibiting Hyde from entering the properties while they are being shown to prospective buyers), and (4) the POA's efforts to collect fees. The order also restrains Hyde from any attempt to collect fees under a Licensing Agreement that he claims gives him the power to make those collections. Finally, the order restrains Hyde from representing to anyone, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that he—or the entities that he controls—"has the authority to manage the airport."

Hyde raises five issues challenging the temporary-injunction order. The structure of his issues makes it difficult to give a short summary of each issue's resolution. The broad-brush summary of our resolution is that the concessions made by the POA on appeal, the implications of those concessions, and other aspects of the record cause us to invalidate most of the order's restraints. Indeed, of the six restraints contained in the temporary-injunction order, only one survives our review—the restraint prohibiting Hyde from interfering with repairs or improvements by the airport's property owners to common airport properties or to "areas governed by [the] property owners' easement rights."

II. Factual and Procedural Background

As we noted in the introduction, the POA lost a prior appeal after it tried to create a uniform set of restrictions governing the airport development and to solidify its claimed right to control the airport's management. Id. The prior appeal came to us with a more in-depth record and a broader scope of our review because it involved the review of a judgment on the merits. Id. at 645. Though the following quote contains facts beyond those found in the record before us, this extract from our prior opinion illustrates the chaotic state of the airport's restriction scheme and how that chaos has produced a long-running conflict:

Edna Whyte created the Airport in 1969. Thereafter, at different points in time, different individuals or entities developed and deed restricted different tracts of land surrounding the Airport. Important for purposes of this appeal, the deed restrictions did not employ a uniform procedure for assessing fees to maintain the Airport's common areas—the runway, taxiways, and access or ramp areas.

Whyte's company, the Aero Valley Development Company (AVDCO), developed the land generally located northeast of the Airport. The properties that AVDCO sold granted owners access to the Airport's common areas via an express easement. AVDCO also deed restricted its subdivisions. Of the eight sets of deed restrictions burdening the northeast properties, most call for an Architectural Control Committee (ACC) to collect a fee from the property owners to maintain the Airport's common areas. Seven of the deed restrictions can be amended when "an instrument signed by a majority of the then record owners of the property has been recorded."

Hyde-Way acquired the Airport in 1982 and is the current owner. Hyde-Way also acquired and partially developed a 119-acre tract generally located northwest of the Airport. Like AVDCO, Hyde-Way imposed deed restrictions on the properties it sold, but instead of conveying easements to access the Airport's common areas, Hyde-Way'sdeed restrictions afforded property owners access to the common areas via a "Runway and Taxiway License." And instead of paying a fee to a committee to maintain the common areas, property owners with a license agreement paid Hyde-Way an annual license fee. But similar to the AVDCO restrictions, the Hyde-Way restrictions can be amended by "an instrument signed by a majority of the then property owners of record."

A number of third parties developed and deed restricted several areas generally located in the southern half of the Airport. According to the POA, by 2016, almost all of the lots located in that area were burdened by some form of Hyde-Way's deed restrictions.

Id. at 645-46 (footnotes omitted).

The conflict at the heart of the prior appeal was the POA's effort to cement its right to control by having the owners within the various discrete tracts of the development adopt Integrated Deed Restrictions (IDRs) to establish once and for all the POA's "authority to assess fees and maintain the Airport's common areas in the POA." Id. at 645. That effort came to naught when this court held that the POA did not follow the appropriate procedure for the adoption of the IDRs, making those restrictions "invalid and unenforceable." Id. at 652.

Reverting to Plan B, the POA filed a new lawsuit against Hyde—the one that has resulted in this interlocutory appeal. The premise of the current suit is that the restriction scheme was more uniform than anyone had thought. The POA's brief outlines an eight-step process based on a theory that the airport is a "common interest community" and how various title documents vested a committee that was the POA's predecessor with the right to collect fees and to maintain the common areas in thedevelopment. The POA, at least impliedly, concedes a weakness in its theory because it may not apply to the northwest section of the development (the Hyde-Way portion of the development described in the third paragraph of the recitation above that was taken from our prior opinion). To fill this gap, the POA's president testified at the temporary-injunction hearing that the northwest section had, in the time since our prior opinion, adopted new restrictions that vested the POA with the powers of control that supplanted the ones that Hyde claims. Our record does not contain a copy of these new restrictions, nor does it have any details of the process by which the restrictions were adopted. Hyde challenged the POA's present theory; in his view, the restrictions that underlie the POA's present claim did not burden the title to various sections of the airport that form the basis of his claimed right to collect fees and to control the maintenance of the airport's common areas. Hyde also challenged the validity of the newly adopted restrictions in the northwest section of the development.

In our review of a temporary injunction, we will not address the validity of the POA's present theory or whether it can rely on that theory in the present suit. Instead, we focus on the POA's requests that the trial court restrain certain actions by Hyde...