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That’s what I thought when I first interviewed him more than a year ago. A neighbor had a construction project that encroached on his property. He tried to talk to the neighbor but that went nowhere. He asked Jefferson County officials for documents, and they said the property wasn’t in the county — it was in its own incorporated village.

Jerome sent a Sunshine Law request to the tiny community, called Peaceful Village. Sure, they told him, you can have the documents — if you pay $4,000.

Situations like this play out in cities and counties around St. Louis all the time. Folks find out a lot about their local government when they want to protect their property rights from somebody who seems to be infringing on them.

Jerome didn’t like what he found. Peaceful Village was being run by Dan Ross Jr., who pastors the New Hope Fellowship Church, and members of his family. The village was created in 2008, after the Missouri Legislature passed a controversial law (later repealed) that paved the way for such communities, allowing landowners to bypass building and zoning regulations. Peaceful Village covers 78 acres and has about 70 residents.

When I first wrote about Jerome’s battle with Peaceful Village, he had successfully created a petition to try to have the village dissolved. He lost that vote a year ago.

But now, the tide has turned. Last week, the new Peaceful Village Board of Trustees, no longer under majority control of the Ross family, voted to rescind the annexation of the property next to Jerome’s house. The two buildings on that property are sober homes for adults. They are run by a nonprofit Ross created, built on land he owns and improperly annexed into the village he used to run.

Now the property is officially in Jefferson County, and Jerome plans to do what he tried to do in the first place: get county officials to enforce their zoning and building codes. He’s confident the two buildings are in violation.

“Democracy wins,� Jerome told me. “The board is no longer controlled by one family, and the following of the actual law is now taking place.�

The change in Peaceful Village governance started slowly. I reported last year that Ross didn’t actually live in the village and so was ineligible to be on the board of trustees. He later resigned. Ross asked a local resident, Kelly Fagala, to assume the chairmanship, assuring her the job duties would be minimal.

Fagala, though, did her research. She found out the village wasn’t following the state’s Sunshine Law. She also discovered the annexations were questionable, and that the Ross family’s conflicts of interest abounded. She and another board member, Danielle Shannon, tried to start running the village like a real government, but they were often stifled by Ross’ son, Daniel Ross III, and his wife, Rachel. Both are still on the board.

In April, a resident who had been following the controversy, John Kindermann, won election to the board by one vote. At his first meeting, he sided with Fagala and Shannon as they did what they had tried to do for months: undue the annexation of the sober homes that was so poorly handled in the first place.

For Fagala, none of this is personal, even though she’s suffered through some nasty attacks by Ross and his supporters.

“It’s just about following the rules. The rules are there for everyone,� Fagala says. “The goal here was just to fix the errors. The public essentially got cheated out of their rights.�

For Jerome, however, it’s hard to escape how personal this battle has become. In March, the elder Ross sued him in Jefferson County Circuit Court, seeking an injunction to stop him from talking about Ross and the sober homes.

“Defendant has made several attempts through false published defamatory slander with malicious intent to dissolve the Village due to his dissatisfaction with the construction of the Sober Living Facility being constructed near his residence,� alleges the lawsuit.

Jerome’s attorney has filed a motion to dismiss the suit. There is a hearing scheduled for next month.

“It’s worthless,� Jerome says. “It’s an attempt to silence my free speech.�

The High Ridge man, who runs and their families, won’t be silenced. He’ll keep going to Peaceful Village meetings, held at the church across the street from his house, to keep an eye on what happens next. And he’ll be calling county officials to ask them about enforcement on the buildings next door.

“Are they going to follow the law?� he asks.

It’s as good a question now as it was when he asked it the first time.