Thanks to the forum.

I was advised to repost this in its own thread. Thanks Jon.

I have been a member on this forum for a year or so. While I don't post much I read almost everything! I have found allot of information here very useful for my own HOA. As President of my assn. I feel it is my DUTY to gain all the info I can to either solve problems or head them off. I have found many issues here that would not have been addressed in our assn. had I not been on the forum.

All that being said, I wanted to share our late fee issues.

A year ago we seated a new BOD. The previous BOD had spent all of the reserve fund fighting an issue that had nothing to do with the Community. Anyway, that BOD also never (in 3 yrs) collected late fees! Each month they waived any late fees that were charged. Additionally, they watched the delinquency rate continue to rise and did absolutely nothing! So, when we seated the new BOD, I was appointed President. We immediately set out to fix the many issues we faced. We hired an attorney to go after all of our delinquent accounts, and revamped our late fee policy.

The old policy charged $25 per month late fee. This seemed reasonable until we dug deeper. Our docs say the BOD can "charge a reasonable amount for late fees" but we found that with our dues at $70 per QTR the late fee would be more than the dues. This is a no no in Colorado. Our attorney advised us that a court would find this unreasonable.

At the time we were also doing a new budget and raising dues to $100. What we did was rewrote the late fee policy to $25 per QTR. We then waived ALL late fees that were incurred prior to the new policy taking effect. This put everyone on a clean page and gave the assn. a better position should we ever have to go to court over late fees.

Well here we are one year later and I am very happy to say that our BOD has done wonders. We have reduced the number of delinquencies from 238 to 7. We have about 50 late fees per qtr, and have rebuilt our reserve fund to over $30,000.

I must express my thanks to the many people here who have shared their issues and ideas. I cannot overstate how this forum has helped me, our BOD, and our HOA as a whole.

Dan - good for you and the board.
As I have said many times before, it is more difficult to FIX something old than to start anew. Sometimes we inherit real messes and have to get things straight. This takes study, time and patience. Congrats for getting it right.

Tish,
Yes we did have that authority. Good question tho. It did take a careful review of the docs to find it. I think the problem with allot of BODs is that they do not get aquainted with their docs. We have a 5 member BOD and 3 of us can alomost recite the dec and bylaws.

Just did a quick double check of our docs. Heres what they say about assessing late fees:

"The association may assess a MONTHLY late charge of 10% of the delinquent assessment."

So our dues are $100.00/QTR but we charge a late fee of $25.00/QTR. This saves the HO $5.00. Not much but it helps.

Additionally, our docs give us the power to waive certain fees:

" Interest, late fees, and fines may, at the discretion of the Board of Directors,be waived at any time. No OWNER, shall have the authority or right to waive any fees assessed without prior authorization from the Board of Directors."

So in short yes we have that power, so we did it the way we did so there was no confusion. The only thing we waived at that time was interest and late charges. The delinquent accounts remained delinquent.

I hope this explains it a little better.