A battle between a city government and Idaho’s wealthy started with this parking lot
When you buy a house in Two Rivers, you are buying a premium lifestyle. The 245-acre subdivision, on Eagle Island between the north and south channels of the Boise River, prides itself on its mountain views, meandering pathways, and 17 of what it calls “lakes” but are in fact man-made ponds.
Homes sell in the high six figures, and the ones behind gates are in the millions. Two Rivers has been called by one real estate agency “the subdivision that every other luxury subdivision is compared to.”
For nearly a decade, the subdivision had a four-car parking lot that anglers, hikers and birdwatchers from outside Two Rivers could use to access the subdivision’s ponds and the Boise River Greenbelt along the nearby south channel. Then, in 2015, a sign appeared: “Parking for Residents Only.”
It was this sign that launched a fight between a homeowners association president and the city of Eagle, spawning a three-year lawsuit and, former Mayor Stan Ridgeway alleges, an effort to oust him from office.
The coniferous-canopied Two Rivers neighborhood in Eagle might seem too calm, too pristine to dredge itself in a conflict such as this.
The neighborhood is a mix of newcomers who cashed out on homes in California so they could buy ones double the size here, and Idaho natives who did well for themselves and wanted a woodsy lot of their own.
It’s the kind of neighborhood where people pay a premium to look out their windows and gaze not into their neighbors’ yards, but through an oak tree into their neighbors’ yards. They want tranquility. They want peace. And they want all these elements that make their homes special to be protected.
It is a new-money neighborhood where the ponds bear “Fishing for Residents Only” signs. And money begets money, which begets lawsuits.
As one resident put it: “Most people here are just everyday people. But some people in the neighborhood feel like they’ve made it. They feel like they’ve got this 938 phone number, and that they’re the rich and privileged people of the world.”
A deal: private roads for public access
Eagle approved Two Rivers in 2002. The subdivision’s developer wanted to keep some roads private — so in exchange for its approval, the City Council asked the builder to include some parking spots that the public could use.
No public easement was ever officially recorded, but a parking lot was included in later iterations of the neighborhood design, located off Channel Way a few yards north of the entrance to Rivermoor, a gated community within Two Rivers.
Rivermoor contains just two estates, both on one-acre lots, each with a garage space large enough to fit a 2,000-square foot house, each with no less than four fireplaces.
The first is owned by software company founder Kevin Zasio — a $2.5 million, 11,321-square foot house. In the $2.7 million, 11,648 square foot estate next door lives Dennis Dillon, namesake of the new and used car dealerships throughout the Treasure Valley.
As some of the neighborhood’s first residents, Zasio and Dillon got firsthand views of Two Rivers’ growth. The parking lot just north of their homes began to represent, for Zasio, the rapid changes in Eagle.
Where once people had rarely, if ever, parked in the lot, around 2015 it started to attract two to three cars a week.
“Then there started to be some nefarious activity,” said Zasio in a phone interview. He started to notice broken bottles. Empty fast food containers. At one point, he said, a sofa was dumped there. “People were getting fed up with all the trash.”
Dillon, who would regularly walk his three standard poodles near the area, said the lot attracted “the wrong type of people at night — people doing dope, injecting heroin into their body. Pot. Sex.”
Scott Marshall, a Two Rivers resident who would pass the lot with his wife on walks and bike rides, doesn’t buy that.
“They all of a sudden decided that the parking lot was nothing but a blight on the community,” he said by phone.
Sure, Marshall had heard stories about some neighborhood kids getting busted for smoking pot there a few times — but was the parking lot blighted? No, he said.
‘For residents only’
Where Marshall and Zasio agree is that the parking lot was used by fishermen looking to cast their lines around the man-made ponds in Two Rivers (ponds, mind you, whose fish had been placed there by the homeowners’ association, or HOA, and were for “residents only.”)
“There are rules for fishing in the ponds,” Zasio said. “You’re supposed to use barbless hooks. You can’t use bait. And frequently the people fishing in those ponds — they’re killing the fish.”
Beyond that, Zasio said fishermen were navigating through people’s private property to reach the ponds. (Marshall, who served on the HOA’s Ponds Committee, said he’d sometimes walk around the community and ask fisherman to respect the neighborhood’s rules if he noticed they weren’t from the area. But many of the fishers were kids, whom he didn’t bother with).
Holly Tanner, who has lived in a nongated house next to the parking lot for 16 years, said that “99% of the people who who parked in the lot did not come to use the path.” Mostly, they were fishermen who would walk through her backyard to get to the ponds.
In one instance, she noticed one man with a tackle box not fishing, but watching her neighbors’ kids swimming in a backyard pool. Another time, she confronted a man who was trespassing, and said he started to swear, in front of children.
She didn’t mind the people who parked at the lot and then walked the nearby public trails. “But if you’re going to come and park and come and fish and loiter around homes, look in people’s garages, watch their kids swim in their pools, I don’t welcome that at all.”
Patrick Orr, spokesman for the Ada County Sheriff’s Office, which runs Eagle’s police department, said in an email, “Eagle Police have received a few calls over the years asking them to investigate reports of things like suspicious vehicles or suspicious people in the area but have found no evidence of any significant crimes occurring there.”
But Zasio and Tanner say that after a while, they gave up on calling the police. “How many times can you call the police and say, ‘Hey, there’s another sketchy person parked in that parking lot,’” Tanner said. “How many times can you do that without just feeling like you give up?”
“It’s not a safe situation to invite into this neighborhood,” she added.
City negotiates
Some in the HOA said that in 2014, the city approached them with interest in placing an easement on the parking lot (Eagle had never gotten one in writing, despite the developers agreeing orally to public parking in 2002.) Some, like Zasio, believed that the public never had the right to use the lot.
In 2015, the city’s parks and recreation director, Mike Aho, reached out to the Two Rivers HOA and made an offer: The city would maintain the lot — as well as the surrounding trails, which already had public easements — if the HOA allowed it to put up a sign at the trailhead nearby that said “public access.” Some HOA members said the city again brought up its interest in an easement as part of the deal.
One HOA member’s notes say Aho said that “there is nothing of record that would establish the parking area as a public right of way.”
Few in the HOA were interested in the city’s offer. Dillon was sure that the sign would attract more visitors. He threatened to sue the board if it accepted the city’s deal. After much discussion, the HOA voted against it.
Soon after, the city got wind that a different sign had appeared over the parking lot — the one that said “Parking for Residents Only.”
A battle between city, HOA looms
In February 2016, the city’s zoning administrator sent the HOA a letter saying that they had no right to hang the signs there; The parking lot was for the public’s benefit. To this, the HOA sent a response in July, refusing to take down the signs and demanding the city withdraw its claim.
Back and forth went the letters between the city and the HOA. Then between the city attorneys and the HOA’s attorneys.
For a few week in October 2016, the sign disappeared, and the city thought itself victorious. Not so — the sign reappeared in the winter, with a second flurry of letters following.
Meanwhile, the parking lot was growing ever-crowded, Zasio said. He said nearly 100 to 200 cars a week came by to use the lot — nearly all of them fishermen.
In October 2017, the HOA board escalated its response. The board decided to erect bollards — short, thick concrete posts — in front of the lot to prevent anyone from parking there.
“The board starting reaching its wits’ ends,” Zasio said. “I disagreed and said this will only cause more problems.”
Soon after, Zasio scheduled a meeting with Ridgeway to discuss the parking lot.
To Zasio, the meeting went well. “I told him the parking lot was platted private property. I told him that if, for some reason, the city took that property, that the home owners in the surrounding area may have a cause to file a lawsuit.”
Ridgeway saw Zasio’s words as a threat. Ridgeway agreed that the lot was privately owned by the HOA — but it had been dedicated to the public by the developer back in 2002, and that dedication still held up, even if the residents no longer wanted people parking there.
“This was an HOA that was given something special,” Ridgeway told the Statesman by phone. “In return, they were supposed to give all of the citizens access to the river, to a trail. And they decided they didn’t want to do that anymore.”
After the meeting, Ridgeway met with the City Council to tell them that Zasio had hinted at a lawsuit. So the city decided to act first. In October 2017, it sued the Two Rivers HOA.
Two Rivers responds
Ultimately, the HOA board was in charge of deciding whether to fight the suit. But matters within were complicated by the fact that a few years earlier, before Zasio’s involvement, the HOA board had undergone a restructuring that had been meant to increase participation from the subdivision’s gated communities.
Under the new rules, at least one resident from each of Two Rivers’ four gated communities would be guaranteed a seat on the nine-person board, with the other five members elected at large.
That meant that as the only two members of the gated community Rivermoor, either Zasio and Dillon would always be guaranteed a spot.
Four days before Christmas, on Dec. 21, 2017, the board invited Two Rivers home owners to the clubhouse for a meeting to discuss the lawsuit. Nearly 100 people showed up. Some wanted to fight the lawsuit. Some wanted to do anything they could to avoid it. Some didn’t know anything and didn’t really want to get involved.
Zasio and Dillon spoke at length about the history of the drug problems at the lot. All the talk of “nefarious activity” played at residents’ existing fears about safety in the neighborhood, of people coming in from the outside. (A few months later, the association voted to hire a private security firm to patrol its streets.)
Just as scary was the idea of cars flooding into the neighborhood to use the paths. Residents looked with dismay across Eagle Road at the mountain-bike-toting Subarus and trucks that lined up outside of the Island Woods subdivision. That kind of crowding was something few Two Rivers residents would abide.
“It’s a private neighborhood with very expensive homes,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “It’s one of the nicest communities in the area. It’s not to the advantage of anyone in Two Rivers to have a public parking lot anywhere in the community.”
Furthermore, they framed the issue as a matter of property rights: If the HOA didn’t pursue the lawsuit, the city would be taking property that rightfully belonged in private hands.
Those who felt the city had a valid legal claim tried to encourage the HOA to step down and avoid spending money on a suit. But they felt silenced by the HOA board.
“When I tried to explain the history, Zasio basically shut us down,” Marshall said.
Nearly 20 homeowners left the meeting in protest, Marshall estimates. By the time the HOA went to take a vote, about 60 people were left, of which Zasio estimates 80% voted in favor.
“Most people felt that the city didn’t have our back on the real problems,” Zasio said.
The battle heads to court
The HOA lawyered up. It hired Andrea Carroll, a land use attorney who specialized in “disgruntled neighbors” lawsuits (she was also retained by a group of Eagle residents, including Zasio, to sue the city over an apartment and retail project downtown).
Carroll’s main argument against the city was that, sure, the developers may have intended to dedicate a public parking lot to the city back in 2002, but the city had failed to follow up in securing a public easement, or getting anything in writing. So the public never really had legal access to the parking lot from the start.
Fourth District Judge Jonathan Medema agreed, and on June 19, 2019, he dismissed the case, though he didn’t award the HOA any attorney’s fees. A few days later, the board voted to remove the parking lot, approving $3,000 for the job.
For the city, the fight wasn’t over. Its lawyers disagreed with Medema’s rulings. They advised the city to appeal to the Supreme Court. On July 12, 2019, the city did.
It was at this point that Ridgeway, the mayor, started to feel as though he had a constant target on his back, and the man holding the gun was Zasio.
“He was so angry at me that he did every possible thing he could do to discredit me,” Ridgeway told the Statesman.
That fall, Zasio started to file numerous public records requests. He asked for the city’s balance sheet. He asked for any emails that Ridgeway had sent regarding “energy” or “climate” or the Sierra Club, which funds environmentally minded candidates. He also asked for information about Eagle Landing, a property in the central business district that Ridgeway had the city buy and turn into a community center; and about a city contract with Heliodon Lighting — both of which were the subjects of FBI subpoenas filed in December and January.
Zasio’s wife, Cindy, became the chair for Ridgeway’s leading opponent in the three-way 2019 mayoral campaign, Jason Pierce.
“It wasn’t just the Two Rivers lawsuit,” Zasio said. “I fought against Molinari, I fought against the Landing — it was the combination of everything. We felt like it was time for a fresh change. We didn’t feel like we had a mayor who was listening to us.”
In Pierce, he got a mayor who did. In November, Pierce walloped Ridgeway, winning with 3,933 votes to 2,689.
The day after Pierce was sworn in, a friend posted on Zasio’s Facebook page: “I was wondering if your ‘king making campaign’ had worked for you. Well done.”
Parking lot destroyed
At some point around January 2020, the parking lot disappeared. One day it was there, and the next it had been dug up, with fresh sod laid down.
Zasio said he doesn’t remember when it was removed. But November 2019 HOA meeting minutes say the association planned to take it out in January, even as the HOA was still fighting the city’s appeal.
On Jan. 13, Ridgeway, in the last full day of his administration, wrote a letter to the HOA to say it required city approval before it could remove the lot. Two Rivers’ attorney responded with an offer: If the city dropped its appeal and allowed Two Rivers to remove the lot, the HOA would drop its appeal for attorney’s fees.
At a City Council meeting on March 24, Pierce was clear on where he stood: “I think it’s a shame this much money has been wasted on this. … Sometimes as a city when you make mistakes, you need to admit to it and move on, and that’s just my two cents.” The city, he said, had already spent $41,000 on the case.
Councilman Miranda Gold, who has regularly disagreed with Pierce, reminded the council that the trial for the appeal would be coming up in a matter of weeks. “If we stop at this point, then the money will be wasted,” she said.
The council voted to continue the case, with newly elected Councilman Charlie Baun, a Pierce ally, the only dissenting voice.
In May, the Idaho Supreme Court heard oral arguments. Its justices were unanimous in their conclusion, which was released on Tuesday, July 7, and was different than the lower court’s.
The justices found that when the developer made an oral commitment to include a parking lot to be used by the public, that counted as a “common law” dedication. When the city later, in the subdivision’s design review, approved the parking lot, it was effectively accepting the developer’s dedication of public access.
The case was over. The city had won.
The Supreme Court remanded the case to the district court, instructing it to award the city the victory. The HOA may also be forced to reinstall the lot, according to Joe Borton, Eagle’s attorney on the case. The court could award the city injunctive relief that would prevent a future HOA board from tearing out the lot again.
Ridgeway is delighted. For him, the case was never about private property rights. “It was an access issue,” Ridgeway said.
For Marshall, the resident who walked and biked by the lot, it was about principle.
“The parking lot was no big deal,” he said. “It’s about people trying to ramrod stuff through for their own benefit.”
Zasio sent an email to the HOA on the Wednesday following the decision: “I spoke with our attorney, and he made it clear that the City does not have a clear path forward and the ‘waters are muddy.’”
As for whether the board will fight the suit further, Zasio told the Statesman that “there are still some unresolved issues” and measures “we can take to protect our private property.” He said the city may have won the public access, but he believes it’s up for debate whether the neighborhood must reinstall the parking lot.
One victory for Zasio, at least, is that fishing in the pond nearest to the old lot has been down nearly 90% since the lot was taken out.
“Where people park now is in the clubhouse parking lot,” Zasio said. “We’re working on that.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
