Power-mad HOA president tries to cover up bylaw violations and accidentally exposes them, so new homeowner plans to vote her out next annual meeting

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  via Frederick Shaw

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• HOA President might have shot herself in the foot

  
  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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  via SlothyMcGillicutty

• HOA boards attract the kind of people who want authority so badly they volunteer for a thankless unpaid position just to have somewhere to exercise it. Most of them are harmless nuisances. Some of them discover that nobody is really reading the bylaws and start treating the neighborhood like a small personal kingdom, which works fine right up until the moment someone starts reading the bylaws.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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  via Frederick Shaw

  Woman with glasses sitting at wooden table indoors, arms crossed, looking aside in a casual social setting.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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  via Vasi

  Smiling woman with curly hair at outdoor café table, relaxed pose, looking at camera in sunny urban setting.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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• The interim member-at-large reclassification is a masterpiece of retroactive rule invention. A neighbor raised her hand at a meeting, got added to the board, voted at multiple meetings over the course of months, and then one day received the news through a neighborhood-wide email that she had apparently always been in a non-voting interim position, a term nobody used at the time, a concept nobody explained to her, and a designation that was invented specifically because someone asked a question the president did not want to answer. The neighbor found out she was interim the same way everyone else did, by reading the newsletter.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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• Misspelling of bylaws as bi-laws in an official communication explaining what the bylaws say is a small detail that somehow makes the whole thing worse.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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• But what makes this situation genuinely entertaining is that the president created most of her own problems by trying to get ahead of them. Ignoring a direct question and then blasting the entire neighborhood with a hasty clarification drew more attention to the issue than a straightforward answer ever would have. Now there are records showing board members voting in a capacity the president is now claiming they never had, meeting minutes with disputed omissions that the board refuses to correct, and an annual meeting coming up where the bylaws explicitly require full inspection access that is already being quietly walked back.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty

• Showing up to that meeting with a thorough read of the actual bylaws, a list of documented inconsistencies, and a nomination ready to go is not a dramatic power move, it is just being prepared. The president handed over most of the ammunition herself, which is what tends to happen when someone is more focused on controlling information than on actually running things correctly.

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  via SlothyMcGillicutty
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• As they (almost) say, bi-laws be bylaws. 

  The meeting should be very interesting.

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