Alexander Winter filed a petition against the Cortina Homeowners Association, alleging that the association violated A.R.S. § 33-1805 by failing to provide several requested association records within ten business days [1, 2]. The documents Winter requested included delinquency reports, past operating budgets from 2007 to 2013, and various vendor contracts and invoices, including those for CleanCuts, Renaissance Community Partners (RCP), Duford, JSJ Enterprises, and C&G communications [3, 4]. Cortina maintained that it had not violated the statute and noted that it had already provided Winter with requested documents to comply with an order from a prior administrative hearing between the two parties (Docket No. 13F-H1314001-BFS) [2, 5]. Following that prior hearing, Cortina turned over 3,200 pages of documents to Winter [6, 7].

During the hearing for the present case, the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) determined that many of the specific records Winter sought—such as the delinquency reports, the Duford contract and invoice, the JSJ Enterprises contract or bid, and the C&G communications bid—did not actually exist [8]. Furthermore, other requested documents, such as the 2007 and 2008 operating budgets, were simply not in the association's possession [8, 9]. The ALJ concluded that Cortina could not be held responsible for producing documents that did not exist or that it did not possess, and found no credible evidence that Cortina had withheld any requested documents that were actually in its possession [8].

Additionally, the ALJ found that Winter's requests concerning the CleanCuts and RCP contracts and invoices had already been explicitly addressed in the parties' previous administrative hearing [10, 11]. Consequently, the legal principle of collateral estoppel precluded those exact same issues from being relitigated in the current hearing [11].

As a final outcome, the ALJ deemed the Cortina Homeowners Association the prevailing party and ordered that the matter be dismissed [12]. Because the Department of Fire, Building and Life Safety took no action to accept, reject, or modify this decision by the statutory deadline of April 25, 2014, the ALJ's ruling was officially certified as the final administrative decision on May 1, 2014 [13-15].