The battles of Broken Top may be about to spill over into a legal wrestling match.

Six weeks after an unnamed Seattle family trust floated plans to build a hotel and a retail ”village” on the gated community’s centerpiece golf course, two club members have filed a legal action to demand arbitration or mediation to clarify their ownership rights.

And the Broken Top Homeowners Association has contacted an attorney of its own to determine what kind of legal grounds it may have to combat, or control, the Seattle owners’ development plans.

”We’re just trying to protect ourselves and keep everybody as calm as we can,” said Ron Webber, president of the homeowners association. ”The thing that’s tragic about all of this are the fears and the uncertainties that it’s creating in this otherwise calm and peaceful community. And that is sad.”

The family trust bought the controlling interest in Broken Top Partners LLC, the club’s owner, in early January from Bend developer Don Bauhofer.

Six months earlier, though, Bauhofer offered to sell the club to its members at prices ranging up to $55,000 apiece.

Claiming unending losses on the course’s operations, Bauhofer and his ownership group gave the members 10 years to come up with 300 buy-ins to complete the deal. But the deal came with a deadline: 100 members had to buy in within a short time frame, or Bauhofer vowed to open the course to more public play to increase its revenues.

The members beat the deadline, coming up with more than 140 full-cost members and another handful of $5,000-apiece ”social,” or non-golf, equity members.

Now that Bauhofer has sold the club’s ownership entity, Broken Top Club Partners, to another party, though, at least some of the ”equity members” are demanding to have their status clarified.

In a letter headed ”Notice of Dispute” sent to the Seattle trust’s representatives on Friday and posted on a Web site set up for Broken Top members, Portland attorney David Markowitz says that the trust’s representatives have indicated that the trust no longer plans to give the members the full opportunity to buy the club, despite Broken Top Partners’ agreement to do so.

It also says the new owners are trying to ”redevelop the property” before the members have their full chance to buy it.

The letter, sent on behalf of club members Ron Cole and Mark Powell, demands ”mediation of this dispute and if necessary arbitration.” It also demands that the new owners reveal their identities ”as part of the good faith negotiations.”

Angus Cameron, a San Francisco real estate adviser retained by the Seattle owners to handle the club transaction for them, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Bauhofer said Wednesday night that he structured the deal with the Seattle trust the way he did – by selling the partnership and not the club itself – partly to preserve the partnership’s agreement with the members. He and his partners are not a party to the legal dispute, but he said ”we will cooperate and participate in it to the extent requested by the parties.

”There was nothing that we did (in the sale) that should have, or could have, changed the character of the agreements,” Bauhofer said.

The Broken Top Homeowners Association is not involved in the club’s ownership dispute at all. But it could get intensively involved if the new owners go ahead with the plans they floated in invitation-only ”focus group” meetings last month to build a large condo/hotel and other retail-style developments in a community that was laid out in the 1990s to be an exclusively residential planned community, Webber said.

The association has asked an attorney to study its situation, to tell it whether the city’s current zoning and Planned Unit Development rules would likely give the association enough legal ammunition to stop the type of development the owners have floated.

If, that is, a formal proposal is ever made.

”What if this weird stuff really does come to pass?” Webber said. ”We should be ready. So we are trying to get ready in the simplest, easiest way that we can.”