It sounds to me like a county bureaucrat was called in to enforce the letter of some kind of zoning rules.
If the facts as stated were true, there is virtually no way anybody could ever, ever know this was even going on. meetings of 15 people are small--it's like a dinner party or a poker game.
How did they find out about these meetings, and why would they care? If you follow the (typical) reasoning that bureaucrats are lazy and overworked, this is the last thing they'd want to get involved in.