Amateur Hour and Power Struggles Abound in HOAs

It would be nice if there were just one unifying problem within HOAs. Unfortunately, there are far too many. For starters, HOA attorneys should be required to represent the HOA as an entity. Instead, they represent the Board of Directors. Their involvement often helps foment dissension and encourages authoritian processes. They help write the HOA laws and they make money explaining the laws and/or often sending threatening letters to homeowners.

HOA attorneys also turned themselves into debt collectors, charging their exborbitant attorney fees to homeowners already facing the prospect of foreclosure. Many times neighbors are willing to help work out these problems by establishing a payment plan instead of jumping to foreclosure, BUT since the attorneys make a lot of money foreclosing on properties that is their preferred method of collecting. Is this really how people want to treat neighbors?

Financial disclosures are required but often financials are not given and many times when given are incomplete. An open books policy should be required to ensure homeowners are properly informed of financial decisions being made on their behalf. What exactly is the justification of hiding financial information? If HOA Boards take the time to build community and work together with homeowners almost any reasonable and necessary replacement, repair or maintenance will be approved. Problems are created when HOA Boards exceed their authority, don't plan adequately and/or keep homeowners in the dark.

Even developers are disallowed from adding common elements without holding a meeting of the membership to approve new additional elements. HOA Board of Directors should be held to the same standard. There are too many incidents of Board of Director "pet projects", such as additional pickleball courts, bocce, basketball courts, gazebos, etc. being approved without a vote of the membership. These new elements, which were not in the original plan, require maintenance, replacement and/or repair in prepetuity!

Election of officers must be trustworthy. Proxies especially for elections must be disallowed. Private ballots must be secured by ballot box and properly counted at a public meeting or possibly electronically submitted and counted by an outside independent source.

Changing the Declaration should require a positive vote of 60% of the membership. The current threshold is too high.

I hear complaints about neighbors not understanding the rules, yet Boards ofen don't understand their responsibilities. Board training should be required. It's not that difficult.