Board of Directors Majority

Our by-laws clearly state that a majority of the seats on our Board of Directors must be occupied by Home Site Owners. The problem we are having is that in our recent election this past Tursday, three employees from the Declerant's parent company had the three highest number of votes due to the fact that the Declerant still owns a large portion of the Home Sites.

My question is are these employees considered Home Site Owners? They personally do not qualify because they are not on title of any property. They are reasoning since the Declerant is a Home Site Owner then they can have as many seats as they want.

All criteria to trigger the Home Site Owner majority has been met, the clearest one is January 1, 2011. The Declerant control actually expired sometime in 2009 and they were in violation last year as well. They are also violating the by-laws and CC&R's in several other areas seemingly at will and don't seem to care.

The issue is you are in South Carolina, which has not very good HOA statutes. Therefore, most of the information regarding your HOA will be contained in your governing documents and which we cannot physically see.

Here is the pertinant verbiage:

At such times as Declarant no longer has the right to appoint or remove Directors as provided in Section 4 of this article, a majority of the Directors must be Home Site Owners.

Section 4 outlines that they no longer have this right as of January 1, 2011.

It also defines ownership as acquisition of fee simple title to any one or more Home Site.

What I take from this is that yes, the Declarant is still a Home Site Owner and can vote as such but the employees of their parent company are not nor would anyone not on the title even residents who's spouse is listed as the sole owner, and they can not hold a majority of the seats.

Some more background, there were three employees that were on our ballot, one of them claims to be the proxy for the Declarant and they only voted for themselves so that they had at least twice as many votes as the other candidates.

He is ONE "Member",no matter how may voting rights he has.

That has nothing to do with being a candidate for the board. He cannot be "5 candidates"

BTW - do you have any other multi-owners? Think of the chaos if you did. That person place relatives as candidates for the board.

None of the employees own any home sites, in fact the developer group is in North Carolina as is their pick for the property management company, who they are relying on way too much but that's another story.

The election was this past Tuesday, the new board has yet to meet to name the HOA officers and new committees. I have a call into the project manager for the developer to get this straightened out, the spirit of the by-laws is clearly to ensure that residents have a majority of the seats on the board and I think the language is also clear in that regard as well.

The non-majority are two residents who are in the title documents to their homes and one of them already quit so now since the vacancy is voted on by the remaining board, they will get to name the new member and give no chance for a tie to have it go back to the residents. The three employees have no ties to the LLC set up to be the Declarant aside that they work for the parent company and manage the project.

Maybe if one of them was the President of the LLC then they might have a point that he would be a homesite owner and then the other two could serve but that is not the case.

Phone calls are nice but you need to start a paper trail.

Send a certified letter to the Board, cc to the management company and (if desired) the registered agent, simply stating that you are challenging the results of the election as per the bylaws, Article abc, Section 123, it clearly specifies a requirement that x seats be held by property owners in the development. Explain that it is your understanding that [name the candidates]are not property owners and therefore one of them must be disqualified and replaced with a candidate who is a homeowner.

I would add that you can understand how this might have been overlooked when counting the votes. However, now that the Association is made aware of this oversight that you expect it to be corrected prior to the 1st meeting of the board. Additionally, identify that you would like to be in attendance at that meeting and would like to be notified so you may attend.

You can still work with phone calls, but follow them up in writing as well in the following format:

Dear [Person],

I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk with me on mm/dd/yyyy to discuss [topic].

It was my understanding from that conversation that

abc was agreed to, def would be looked into, xyz we could not reach an understanding about but agreed 123 would take place.

Tim