Jury mostly sides with mobile home park owners in lawsuit alleging negligence

MARSHALL, MINN. – The roads at Broadmoor Valley, the largest mobile home park in Lyon County, were pocked with suspension-jarring potholes, some a few yards wide and filled with January’s snowmelt.

Just hours before and a few miles away, Bennett Hartz, assistant attorney general for Minnesota, made an impassioned speech on the conditions at the park during his closing arguments against the owners of Broadmoor Valley.

A civil lawsuit, launched with great fanfare in 2021 by the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, accused controversial Colorado businessman Paul Schierholz and his company Schierholz and Associates of neglecting failures such as not taking care of the park, particularly its roads.

“The roads in Broadmoor Valley — they’re not normal,” Hartz said in Thursday’s closing arguments.

But in an unusual move, a judge ruled to strike Hartz’s closing speech from the record and asked the jury to rely on their recollection of the eight-day trial.

The jury on Thursday night sided in favor of Schierholz and Associates on almost all claims in the lawsuit. Its decision, after about three and a half hours of deliberation, ended a trial with hundreds of pieces of evidence drawing from five years of state investigation.

In the verdict, the jury found the roads of Broadmoor Valley permitted normal resident travel and had done so for the last five years. They determined that the common areas and facilities of the park were currently in clean, orderly and sanitary condition.

They rejected the Attorney General Office’s claims that Schierholz and Associates charged renters excessive late fees or that the company committed consumer fraud by knowingly providing residents with false information.

And the jury found that Schierholz and Associates’ rules did not prohibit free expression of speech in the park, after accusations that residents advocating for better living conditions had been banned from entering.

The jury did find that Schierholz and Associates had failed to maintain the common areas of Broadmoor Valley at certain points over the last five years but did not hold the company’s CEO responsible.

“The jury verdict confirms that this case should have never been brought,” defense lawyer Leah Huyser, representing Schierholz and Associates, said in a call Friday.

Huyser said Schierholz, the company’s CEO who previously has said he might close the park, is looking forward to running the community without having to fight off “baseless allegations.” The lawsuit had been put on hold in 2023, after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Marshall Independent reported in October.

Huyser said she’s never seen a judge strike down a closing statement. “That was unusual,” she said.

The decision by District Judge Tricia Zimmer came after the defense objected to what it called misstatements by Hartz during his closing arguments. Hartz exaggerated testimony by a witness, improperly described the legal standard for a claim, and referenced evidence that had been already excluded by the court as hearsay, Zimmer wrote in a memo filed Monday morning that included more than 10 examples.

A one point, Zimmer called Hartz to the bench and warned him that she was considering discontinuing his closing argument all together.

Zimmer wrote that there had been a series of misstatements of facts and the law by Hartz and other lawyers from the Attorney General’s Office throughout the trial. “A pattern of misconduct may have a cumulative prejudicial effect requiring a more serious sanction,” Zimmer wrote.

In addition to striking Hartz’s closing statement from the record, Zimmer also dismissed a claim that Schierholz took retaliatory actions against Broadmoor Valley residents, due to similar misstatements.

A spokesman for Attorney General’s Office on Monday said there was disappointment “with a number of the rulings at trial” and they are evaluating how to proceed.

“Attorney General [Keith] Ellison is committed to ensuring Minnesotans live in communities that are clean, orderly, and sanitary, and that residents are treated fairly and with the respect that all Minnesotans deserve,” spokesman Brian Evans said in an email.

Broadmoor Valley is home to about 75 households, many of whom receive government assistance to make ends meet, the initial complaint against Schierholz and Associates said.

Some residents have complained for years about conditions at Broadmoor Valley. They said that broken windows, frozen pipes, holes in exterior walls and damage from falling tree limbs were just some of the maintenance failures by Schierholz.

The 2021 suit filed in Lyon County District Court had asked the court to order Schierholz to fix unlawful conditions and sought relief, restitution for harmed residents, civil penalties and attorney fees. These penalties totaled more than $3 million.

In their closing arguments, Schierholz’s attorneys acknowledged the Colorado Springs-based developer has few fans in the area. They portrayed him as the target of state prosecutors spending millions to investigate him.

“This lawsuit is not about the residents; it’s about nailing Paul Schierholz,” Kevin Riach, a lawyer on the company’s defense team.

Back at the park, Debra Springer-Ertl, 67, who had testified in the trial, showing photos of potholes at the park, said she was disappointed but felt the case slipping away in the trial’s final days.

Fifteen-year resident Rosa Hernandez, 45, said Monday that she was angry and frustrated upon hearing the jury’s verdict that the roads allow normal travel. “I live here,” she said. “I know how the park looks.”