August 9, 2019
Dear Everyone:
My goodness! Last night’s
Homeowner Association (HOA) meeting turned into a 3-hour marathon.
The only thing missing was pitchforks and flaming torches.
Things haven’t been this lively since I first bought my place ten
years ago.
What happened? Follow…
I agreed to serve on the HOA board over five years ago.
For a while things went fairly smoothly.
There was a lot of work involved, partly because of a paucity of
volunteers to help out with things like renting out the Clubhouse and
maintaining the security system at the two swimming pools.
But it wasn’t really that difficult.
Until “Patty” joined the Board a couple of years ago and proceeded to
make a perfect pest of herself.
She also made a play to “take over” control of the Board by
trying to get two of her friends elected.
Apparently, “Patty” was unaware that only homeowners could vote for
Board members and that nearly half of the 188 units here are rented out
by homeowners who live elsewhere.
So “Patty” was running around “campaigning” for herself and her
two friends to a lot of people who couldn’t vote for them.
It was then that I discovered that while I was doing all the work,
“Patty” was claiming all the credit.
I had a little talk with “Phoebe”, the third Board member, and we
agreed upon a course of action.
For an election to take place, at least 51% of the homeowners have to
send in their ballots, or appear in person, to vote.
Needless to say, most homeowners can’t even be bothered to mail
in their ballots.
So, at the next HOA meeting, and official “election”, the Property
Manager announced that a “quorum was not reached” and the usual
procedure was to simply keep all the Board members in place until the
next year. That’s when I
announced that I was stepping down from the Board, effective
immediately. Whereupon
“Phoebe” did the same.
“Patty” was absolutely delighted to get complete control of the Board in
one fell swoop.
(This is called “giving her enough rope to hang herself”.)
She immediately began making changes.
She fired the maintenance staff.
She fired the Property Management Company.
She fired the pool service company.
She fired the “porter”, who keeps the place clean.
The only reason she didn’t fire the landscaping company was that she had
just got a new company in when the rest of the Board walked out on her.
This was partly because we had changed landscaping companies four
times in one year, all because of “Patty”.
Three times she wanted to get a new company in.
In the last case, the current-at-the-time company gave notice
that they would no longer work for us.
In other words, they fired us.
And so it went for the past two years.
“Patty” changed almost everything.
And all without giving the homeowners any notice of what she was
doing and why.
She also got into the habit of only holding HOA meetings at the last
minute, and without notifying the homeowners about them.
In other words, she was holding almost “secret” meetings.
Never mind that this is a violation of state law.
It also annoyed a lot of people.
Then, in June, we all got a letter in the mail announcing that “Patty”
had fired the new Property Management company and hired a new, new
company. Bear in mind that
this meant everyone had to send their monthly HOA dues to a new address.
Again.
The new Property Management company mailed out an announcement last week
that there would be an HOA meeting this Thursday, last night.
Over twenty people showed up.
And they were flaming mad.
What was supposed to be a “brief” homeowners’ comment item on the agenda
quickly turned into venting session that went on for well over an hour.
The new Property Manager, “Jeremiah”, may have been prepared for
walking into a speeding propeller, but it couldn’t have been easy.
Nevertheless, he tried to let everyone have their say, while “Patty”
ping-ponged between blaming the previous Boards (including me and
“Phoebe”) and blaming the previous Property Management Company, which
she had hired. In the
meantime, her two other Board members, “Timmy” and “Hadji” bickered over
one picayune detail after another.
It was all quite entertaining.
It also had the effect of spurring more than one homeowner to ask how
they can get elected to the Board.
There may be some serious housecleaning in the not-too-distant
future.
In the meantime, “Jeannie” and I are flying off to New York this Sunday
to spend a week or more with “Alice” and “Frankie”.
We’re staying over the following weekend in an effort to bully
the boys into joining us.
Whether they do or not, we’ll all have a great time.
Which means no Letter next week.
Love, as always,
Pete
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