As I've mentioned here before, my life of late has been consumed by my homeowners association. It's politics in miniature, but none the less vicious and sad. I've been serving as President of our HOA since January and I've managed to alienate many members of the previous Board, who were running our association in a very slip-shod fashion, ignoring bylaws and acting behind closed doors with no attempt at transparency.
Having ditched most of those folks in a special election demanded by the membership, I retained the Presidency with a brand new Board of Directors made up of some really good people, devoted to turning our association around, doing business in front of the membership and setting things in order. For the first time ever, as far as we know, we opened up our Board meetings to all homeowners. We organized the files of the HOA, started a community website and scanned important documents for the membership to access on-line. We've published three glossy full-color 12+ page newsletters, contrasting the 1-page photo-copied "newsletters" that we used to get from the HOA.
Then, as things were getting nicely organized and running smoothly, out of the blue a group of homeowners decided to sue the HOA. Took us to court for recording a document that we procured in our efforts to clarify the duties of the HOA relative to the covenants governing our neighborhood.
We won the court case, and then some of these folks decided to contact the DA and get him to press criminal charges against us. The DA has told them that there is no evidence of any crime, and since we won the case they brought against us in District Court, perhaps they should consider dropping their grievance against us.
It's been an ugly few months with daily e-mail attacks in a public chat forum that some of our homeowners started. I often spent 60 hours a week defending ourselves from verbal attacks by homeowners who would lie and defame us in e-mails. Meanwhile, we were getting plenty of support from the majority of the community, who just wanted all this nastiness to go away.
Last Tuesday we had our annual membership meeting, including the annual election of Board of Directors. The seven of us who have been on the Board since last April plus one new candidate ran against a group of candidates who claimed to oppose our "lack of transparency" and our "lust for power." They ran seven candidates, three of whom, it turns out, are supportive of our group. Surprise!!! The opposition was totally shocked when we listed three of their candidates on our campaign flyer!
It tipped the scale - those three candidates got the most votes, as they were on both "tickets" and all eight of our candidates were elected. They got two of their loyal supporters out of a 13-member Board. So truth and justice has won the day, but the future is still cloudy.
One of the opposition winners is one of the homeowners who sued the HOA. So now he's on the Board and he and his co-petitioners have filed a Motion to Reconsider, asking the court to reverse the ruling in our favor. It's going to be very interesting having this guy on the Board while he's involved in a legal action against the Board.
This whole adventure has been great fodder for my book, though. I'm at work on a Steven King-style thriller called "HOA". My characters come from real life, just beefed up a little to make them really scary. Although, for some of them it didn't take a whole lot of beefing up!
I'd be curious to hear from anybody else who's had any experiences with their HOA. It seems to be a growing issue around the country. I read regularly about HOAs that abuse their power against homeowners, often to the point of foreclosing on homes. That's the model that hope to avoid here in our neighborhood, and our new Board of Directors will work hard to set policies that are homeowner-friendly.
A friend of mine is working on publishing a book that he wrote on HOAs. His is a documentary - absolutely non-fiction and probably as scary as my book. Then there's a local football hero, ex-Bronco, Reggie Rivers, who's written a semi-fictional (based on real life) book called "My Ex-Wife's Boyfriend and Our Feud With The Highlands Ranch Homeowner's Association." A fascinating title - I can't wait to read that one!
Anyway, the reason I'm writing here on my own site tonight is that I FINALLY HAVE TIME!!! We won the election and suddenly the nasty e-mails have stopped. I supposed I'd be called cynical if I admit that I fear this is just the calm before the storm. But I have a sense that they're out their plotting something. Scheming and strategizing. The whole experience has tarnished my soul, I fear. I'm very leery of people and their motives. I have a solid group of close friends that I do trust and we have a majority on the Board now. But I just sense something in the wind. Still, it's nice to have a few days off to breathe a little easier and get back to things I really enjoy. I actually played my guitar today!
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