"It turns out, I'm suing myself as an HOA member."
That's how longtime Lacamas Shores resident Steve Bang described his own lawsuit, in a 2023 interview with The Columbian. Bang has lived on the south shore of Lacamas Lake since 1999. He is also a dues-paying member of the association he sued.
For anyone comparing Camas neighborhoods by price per square foot, that sentence reads like neighborhood trivia. For anyone about to write an offer on a home inside Lacamas Shores, it's the reason the resale certificate deserves a slower read than the folder of paint swatches and community newsletters it usually arrives with.
What the HOA Was Actually Built to Do
Lacamas Shores exists in its current form because of a 1988 shoreline permit. Before the roughly 250 homes on and above the lake could be built, the city required a biofilter, a constructed wetland of grasses and aquatic plants designed to strip phosphorus and nitrogen out of the neighborhood's stormwater before it reached Lacamas Lake. The same permit required the developer to create a homeowners association whose job, in part, was to maintain that biofilter indefinitely.
For roughly five years, it worked. Then maintenance lapsed. Alder trees and blackberry brambles crowded out the low grasses that did the actual filtering, and by 2020 independent water testing led by neighbor Marie Tabata Callerame, a founding member of the Lacamas Watershed Council, found the biofilter was doing the opposite of its job. Instead of cleaning stormwater, it was adding more phosphorus to the outflow than it received.
Bang gave the HOA a 60-day notice in August 2021 that he intended to sue under the federal Clean Water Act. He followed through that November, filing suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. He also pursued a separate state claim, and in July 2023 a Clark County Superior Court judge ruled that the Lacamas Shores HOA had violated its own covenants by failing to maintain the biofilter, as The Columbian reported at the time.
HOA president Don Trost, who took the role in 2021, pushed back on the framing publicly, arguing that some residents pursuing the issue were more interested in removing trees that block their lake views than in water chemistry. Both things can be true at once. A homeowners association exists to protect property values, and clearing a view corridor and fixing a permit-mandated stormwater facility are not mutually exclusive motives.
What the City's Own Numbers Say
Before assuming Lacamas Shores is the villain of Lacamas Lake's water quality problems, it's worth sitting with the scale. The biofilter's drainage area covers about 77 acres, well under a square mile. Lacamas Creek, by contrast, drains more than 50 square miles and delivers the large majority of the water and nutrient load the lake receives every year, according to figures the city has published through its Lake Management Plan process. Water samples cited by Callerame during a public council meeting, reported by ClarkCountyToday.com, put phosphorus concentrations at the biofilter's outflow at three to ten times the highest levels measured at nearby Currie Creek, which is the kind of number that sounds damning in isolation and considerably smaller once you weigh it against the watershed as a whole.
Neither fact cancels the other out. The biofilter is a small contributor to a lake-wide problem, and a court has still found the HOA responsible for maintaining it under its own governing documents. That combination, small physical footprint, real legal exposure, is exactly the kind of detail a headline median price will never surface.
The Gap Buyers Don't Expect
Here's the part that catches people off guard during a transaction. Washington currently runs two different HOA statutes at once. Communities formed before July 1, 2018, like Lacamas Shores, generally fall under the older Homeowners' Associations Act, RCW 64.38. Communities formed after that date fall under the newer Washington Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, RCW 64.90, often called WUCIOA.
The two statutes treat resale disclosure very differently.
| RCW 64.38 (legacy associations) | RCW 64.90 / WUCIOA | |
|---|---|---|
| Resale certificate required by statute | No statutory requirement; the declaration controls | Yes, a formal certificate covering 26 disclosure items |
| Pending litigation disclosure | Only if the declaration requires it | Required by statute |
| Delivery deadline | Set by the declaration, if addressed at all | 10 days from written request |
| Buyer cancellation right | Not established by this statute | 5 days after receiving the certificate |
| Fee cap | Not set by statute | $275 initial, $100 for updates within 6 months |
That gap matters here specifically. Under RCW 64.38, there is no statewide mandate that a resale certificate exist at all, let alone that it mention pending litigation. Whatever a Lacamas Shores buyer receives from the HOA is shaped by what the association's own declaration says must be disclosed, not by a uniform state checklist. Most declarations do require some resale disclosure, but the completeness of that disclosure depends on decisions the HOA made years ago about its own paperwork.
Washington is phasing all legacy associations into WUCIOA by January 1, 2028, and some WUCIOA governance rules, like a required 15-minute owner comment period at board meetings, already took effect for older communities in January 2026. But the resale certificate content requirements specifically follow the 2028 full transition timeline. Until then, a buyer asking "will the resale certificate mention the biofilter litigation" is really asking a question about Lacamas Shores' own declaration, not a guaranteed feature of Washington law.
What to Actually Ask Before You Remove Contingencies
A few direct questions to the HOA board or its management company, asked in writing, do more here than reading the standard packet twice.
- Does the association's declaration require disclosure of pending or threatened litigation as part of any resale document, and will that disclosure name the specific case?
- What is the current status of the federal Clean Water Act litigation, and has any settlement, consent decree, or court order been entered since the July 2023 state court ruling?
- Has the board budgeted, reserved funds for, or discussed a special assessment tied to biofilter remediation, and is that discussion reflected in board meeting minutes from the last 12 months?
- Does the property's insurance carrier or the association's master policy carry any exclusion or rider related to the biofilter or wetland area?
- Has the association begun preparing for the 2028 WUCIOA transition, and would that change what future owners can expect from resale disclosures?
None of these questions require a real estate license to ask. They do require knowing there's a specific case name, court, and ruling to ask about, rather than a general "any lawsuits?" that a board can technically answer around.
One More Thing Worth Timing Around
If you're touring homes in Lacamas Shores this month, know that the city typically lowers Lacamas Lake by about six feet every fall to inspect and repair its dams, and the 2026 drawdown is scheduled to begin September 21. For a few weeks after that, shoreline and dock areas will look different than they do in July listing photos, mud flats included. It's not a defect. It's a maintenance cycle the city has run annually for years, and it's a good reason to see a shoreline lot in more than one season before you commit to it.
FAQ
Is the federal Clean Water Act lawsuit against the Lacamas Shores HOA still open? As of the most recent confirmed reporting, the case was ongoing following the July 2023 state court ruling on the covenant violation. Court status can change, so confirm the current docket status directly with the HOA or through the public court record before you write an offer.
Does this affect every home in the neighborhood equally? The biofilter sits on association-owned common property, so any remediation cost or special assessment would typically be shared across all dues-paying members rather than assigned to specific lots, though the declaration governs the exact allocation method.
Should this stop someone from buying in Lacamas Shores? Not on its own. The neighborhood's lake access, boat launch, and established character are real and well documented. The point isn't to avoid the neighborhood. It's to read the resale certificate like a legal document instead of a formality, because in this specific HOA, what it does and doesn't say depends on paperwork written years before you ever toured the house.
Buying on the lake shouldn't mean guessing what your HOA's declaration actually requires it to tell you. If you're weighing an offer in Lacamas Shores or comparing it against other Camas neighborhoods, Peter Cutile can walk through the resale certificate line by line before you remove a single contingency. Schedule a consultation to get specific answers before you get specific numbers on a purchase agreement.
