It started with a complaint about late-night noise. Now, more than five years later, a feud at Minnesota's largest condo complex shows no sign of ending.
The long-running dispute at Meadow Creek Condominiums has included malicious websites, vulgar protest signs and noisy demonstrations. The fight has spilled out of the complex into City Hall and the courts, with six-figure judgments and six-figure legal fees. The mayor of Hopkins and the City Council urged the two sides to work out their differences — to no avail.
Mel Pittel, a Meadow Creek condo owner, has led the battle against the condo board and its longtime president, John Ward. In the tale's latest twist, Pittel was elected last month to serve on the board he's spent years fighting. But his victory was short-lived.
The condo's lawyer informed Pittel a week later that he can't take his board seat because of a restraining order that bars him from entering the Meadow Creek office building and forbids him from attending board meetings.
Not surprisingly, Pittel disagrees.
"There's no law that says because you don't like someone, you un-elect them," said Pittel, a semiretired travel agent. "They could drop that restraining order if they wanted to." That's not going to happen, according to Ward, whose tenure as board president spans more than 20 years.
"I don't think so," Ward said this week. "He's pretty disruptive."
Pittel's beef began one night about five years ago, he said, when Ward began remodeling a unit he owned adjacent to Pittel's. Ward owns nearly 50 units at Meadow Creek, according to court documents, but doesn't live there.