Inside Hemlock Farms, a 4,500-acre gated community in Lords Valley, Pennsylvania, a private security force tickets residents for speeding, processes citations through the Pike County magisterial court system, and operates with the same legal authority as the Pennsylvania State Police. The residents who pay for this force through their HOA dues have no vote on who runs it, no oversight over how it operates, and — as multiple court cases have proven — almost no legal recourse when it oversteps.
This isn’t a recent development. It’s been going on for decades.
How a Homeowners Association Gets Its Own Police Force
The legal mechanism is an obscure state statute: Title 22, Section 501 of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, commonly called the Private Police Act. The law was written for hospitals, universities, and cemeteries — entities that maintain buildings or grounds open to the public. It allows qualifying nonprofit corporations to petition the county Court of Common Pleas to appoint private police officers.
Large HOAs like the Hemlock Farms Community Association are registered as nonprofit corporations in Pennsylvania. That means they qualify. Once a judge approves the appointments, those officers swear an oath under Article VI of the state constitution, receive a metallic shield stamped “special officer,” and — on the HOA’s property and the area directly surrounding it — possess full police powers under Pennsylvania law.
The distinction matters. In a standard HOA, a speeding ticket is a covenant violation. You broke community rules. You get fined internally. In Hemlock Farms, a citation issued by their Community Safety Unit goes through the actual Pike County court system. Refuse to pay, and you’re not dealing with a collections notice from your HOA. You’re dealing with a magisterial district judge.
Residents pay municipal taxes for public police protection from the Pennsylvania State Police. They simultaneously pay HOA dues that fund a private force answering to a board of directors they didn’t elect through any public process. The board picks the officers. The board sets the rules. The board decides what gets enforced and how aggressively.
Who’s Running This
The Hemlock Farms Community Association isn’t the only private community in Pike County with a troubled history of self-governance. The track record across these organizations is worth examining.
In May 2014, the Pike County District Attorney’s office received a call from Robert Depaolis, the property manager at Wild Acres Community Association in Dingmans Ferry. Depaolis reported that Myron Cowher, the HOA’s board secretary, had approached him requesting 200 blank ballots belonging to property owners in good standing. Cowher intended to cast these votes himself to guarantee his preferred candidates won the upcoming June board election.
Depaolis reported the plot to the Pennsylvania State Police. They monitored a meeting between Depaolis and Cowher, during which Cowher filled out nine ballots and left with 62 more. He was arrested when he walked out. The investigation led to a second arrest — board chairman Dmitry Kuperschmidt.
The criminal case set a precedent. Courts typically refuse to get involved in private nonprofit board disputes. Tonkin filing actual charges — and getting convictions — was one of the only times Pennsylvania law enforcement treated an internal HOA power grab as what it was: a crime.
The Resident Who Fought Back — and Lost
In 2006, a Hemlock Farms resident named George Simonson refused to pay HOA-issued speeding tickets. He filed a federal lawsuit against the Association, its community manager Michael Sibio, and Community Safety Unit chief William Hamby. He demanded $150 million in damages, alleging civil rights violations, fraud, and extortion.
Judge James Munley of the Middle District of Pennsylvania dismissed the case entirely. The ruling is worth reading closely, because the way Simonson lost reveals exactly why residents keep losing these fights.
Simonson sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal civil rights statute. That law requires proving the defendant acted “under color of state law” — meaning they were functioning as an arm of the government. But Simonson argued both sides at once. In his own complaint, he wrote that Hamby “is not a police officer under the statutes of the State or Federal Government. He is nothing more than a citizen and has no authority over anyone.”
The judge took him at his word. If Hamby wasn’t a state actor, Simonson couldn’t sue him under a statute that only applies to state actors.
The Association’s enforcement of its own speed limits on its own property didn’t qualify either. The judge wrote that Hemlock Farms “did not enforce a state-mandated speed limit or act to expose plaintiff to state penalties for violating Pennsylvania motor vehicle laws.” Private rules enforced by a private corporation on private land. No state action, no federal case.
Simonson also alleged that Sibio altered a notation he’d written on a check. He didn’t cite a specific federal law that was violated. He asked the court to order a RICO prosecution. The judge noted in a footnote that Simonson hadn’t come close to meeting the RICO threshold — but then laid out exactly what that threshold would require: a documented enterprise, a pattern of racketeering activity, a clear nexus between the defendants and that pattern, and resulting injury to business or property.
The judge wasn’t being generous. He was being precise. And in that precision, he left a road map sitting in a footnote that nobody has picked up.
What the Judge Left on the Table
Three things stand out in Judge Munley’s opinion.
First, the dismissal hinged on the fact that no one argued these officers were acting as state actors through their Act 501 commission. Simonson explicitly denied it. A plaintiff who instead documented the Act 501 appointment process — the judicial decree, the sworn oath, the metallic shield, the power to issue citations processed through state courts — would be making a fundamentally different argument. The judge never addressed that argument because nobody made it.
Second, the RICO footnote. The judge unprompted explained what a viable civil RICO claim would need. He wasn’t inviting one. But combined with the 2014 Wild Acres criminal convictions — documented fraud, identity theft, and conspiracy by HOA board officers in the same county — the “pattern” element starts to look less theoretical.
Third, the judge noted but declined to rule on the Rooker-Feldman doctrine — the question of whether a state court had already settled the issue of the HOA’s authority over residents. That question was never fully litigated at the federal level. It was sidestepped.
The Vulnerability Nobody Has Tested
The Act 501 private police charter isn’t permanent. The same Court of Common Pleas that grants it can revoke it. The law requires the entity to be an active nonprofit corporation in Pennsylvania. If that corporate status lapses — through failure to file reports, failure to maintain a registered agent, or fraud — the police force dies with it.
Pennsylvania has stripped Act 501 powers before. The state legislature pulled broad police authority from humane society organizations after years of documented abuse, replacing it with a much stricter licensing regime requiring background checks, firearms certification, and mandatory training.
The most direct path isn’t a federal civil rights lawsuit. It never was. It’s a challenge in Pike County Court of Common Pleas, targeting the Act 501 charter itself. Are the officers operating within the strict geographic limits the statute requires? Does the HOA’s corporate standing actually meet the Act 501 requirements? Has anyone checked?
Nobody has. And that’s the story. Thousands of Pike County residents live under the authority of a private police force that has never been meaningfully challenged in the right court, using the right legal theory, by someone who actually understood what they were fighting.
And remember — the DA’s office doesn’t need a lawsuit to act. In 2014 it took a phone call and documented evidence. Tonkin moved. He’ll move again.