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.