Legal challenges to the lease used by the owner of a survivalist complex south of Edgemont will continue despite a ruling by the South Dakota Supreme Court on Thursday that favored the ownership group of Vivos xPoint, a lawyer for the plaintiff said.
The high court ruled Thursday that the lease is not "illusory," or illegal simply because it was changed after it was signed by a tenant who was evicted from the complex in 2023.
The court ruled in favor of Vivos xPoint Investment Group, which owns the complex of hundreds of former Army munitions bunkers that have been converted to residences for so-called preppers who intend to survive a global catastrophe.
The high court ruling released on Thursday overturned a 2025 circuit court judge's opinion that the lease used by Vivos was illegal and that the subsequent eviction was also therefore improper. The court remanded the case back to circuit court "for further proceedings consistent with this opinion."
As such, the battle to have the lease declared illegal will continue, though with different arguments than the one considered by the Supreme Court, said Matthew Hays McCoy, a Custer attorney who represents the plaintiff in the eviction and who argued on his behalf before the justices.
"Now that this has been kicked back, we cannot use the illusory argument to say the lease is illegal, but we can use other arguments to overturn the eviction," McCoy told News Watch. "In some ways it is kind of irrelevant to the larger issues."
McCoy said Vivos would now have to proceed with a formal eviction process in order to formally kick his client out of the Vivos complex.
He said his client has strong arguments that he did not violate terms of the lease as it was amended by Vivos. McCoy also said he expects that a $17 million class action lawsuit filed in 2025 by several Vivos tenants arguing that the lease is invalid can still move forward.
Eric Schlimgen of Spearfish, attorney for Vivos, was traveling and unavailable for comment on Thursday, according to his office.
Numerous tenant complaints and lawsuits
The current legal entanglement is part of a highly litigious atmosphere surrounding the Vivos xPoint bunker complex, which has been the source of numerous tenant complaints to the state Attorney General's Office, lawsuits on both sides and a near-fatal shooting in 2024, as previously reported by News Watch.
The sprawling Vivos site includes 575 above-ground, earth-covered concrete bunkers that were used by the U.S. military from 1942 to 1967 to store conventional and chemical munitions at the Black Hills Ordinance Depot in a town once known as Igloo.
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The bunkers were purchased by California businessman Robert Vicino in 2016 and have since been rented to survivalists who sign a 99-year lease to live in bunkers they do not own.
The lease governs their residency and includes a list of rules on behavior within the complex. The legal question centered on whether the lease and rules list were legal because Vivos changed the language after the lease was signed.
The 14-page lease and an extensive list of rules and regulations have become the subject of a handful of lawsuits after they were used as the basis to evict several bunker residents.
Evicted tenants then lose the right to occupy the bunkers despite paying up to $55,000 in upfront fees, a monthly service charge and for improvements to make the bunkers more livable.
Eviction came after gun incident
The high court case centered around the eviction of Daniel Sindorf, a former Vivos resident who signed a lease and paid $35,000 up front in 2020. The eviction came after a July 2023 incident in which Sindorf pulled out a gun after he said he felt threatened by a Vivos employee’s dogs.
Vivos states that several months prior to the confrontation, the company added an addendum to the rules included within the lease that made it a violation to “brandish” a weapon outside of designated shooting areas within the complex.
Sindorf’s attorneys argued that the lease and, therefore, the eviction were both illegal because it is not lawful to make changes to a signed lease without consent of both parties or without recourse by the tenant.
In a three-page ruling in April 2025, Circuit Judge Scott A. Roetzel noted that “the 99-year lease is an illusory contract that plaintiff (Vivos) can unilaterally modify the terms of at any time with no resource for defendant (Sindorf)."
But in its ruling Thursday, the high court said that "Vivos' discretion was not unqualified or absolute, as Sindorf contends," and that Vivos' modification of the lease was "reasonable, made in good faith, equally enforced and not adopted for the purpose of evading the loser's obligations."
The court said that the lease and eviction, therefore, were both legal and can be further litigated in circuit court if the plaintiff so chooses.
McCoy said he believes his client and members of the class action lawsuit still have strong cases to get out of their leases and leave the complex without major financial losses if they choose to do so.
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