Court Opinion

ID: 9676927
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:38:26.755831+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:17:05.717112
License: Public Domain

SCOTT BRISTER, Chief Justice,
concurring. .
I agree with the Court’s disposition, and its reticence to rewrite the homeowners’ contracts or create a new fiduciary duty to accommodate them. But because of the potential abuse in the type of development plan used in this case, I would leave some room to address these questions further in the future, and decide this case on another ground.
*721The homeowners here are being taxed without representation. The privately-owned corporation that manages the golf club has the right to assess any maintenance charge it chooses, and payment is secured by a vendor’s lien on each home that may be foreclosed if the charge is not paid. The homeowners never agreed to this; the developer made the arrangement on behalf of the association while he still controlled it. Perhaps the homeowners might have foreseen the possibility from the deed restrictions, but only if they were lawyers trained to assume that every contractual clause would be taken to its most logically horrible conclusion.
Nevertheless, the homeowners do not allege exorbitant assessments or a spate of foreclosures in this case. Instead, they allege disagreements with how the golf club is being run, and seek an equitable accounting to confirm or allay their suspicions.
But an equitable accounting is proper only when normal discovery procedures are inadequate. Hutchings v. Chevron U.S.A., 862 S.W.2d 752, 762 (Tex.App.-El Paso 1993, writ denied). There is no such showing in this record. The Court correctly concludes that the homeowners’ discovery requests were impossibly over-broad, and the trial court jumped over them to the accounting remedy. This was the error.
Whether we should imply a right to an accounting or some other term in these parties’ relationship is a more complicated question. While courts rarely imply terms in a contract, we may do so when the parties so clearly understood a matter they deemed it unnecessary to express it, or a term must be implied to effectuate the full purpose of the contract. See Fein v. R.P.H., Inc., 68 S.W.3d 260, 268 (Tex.App.Houston [14th Dist.] 2002, pet. denied). The structure of this relationship and potential loss of one’s home might require us to reconsider today’s conclusion. But the facts in our record do not warrant any extraordinary intervention here. Thus, I agree the trial court’s judgment should be reversed and remanded for further proceedings.