Landscape Easements

Our developer and HOA Boards have selectively maintained landscape easements on developed lots. For years the HOA membership has been forced to pay for extensive maintenance of landscape easements on the lots belonging to certain individuals while refusing to maintain other landscape easements. This maintenance includes mowing, blowing. irrigation, weeding, seeding, sodding, replacing irrigation pipes, tree removal and replacement. The "special" homeowners with landscape easements are even allowed to irrigate using commercial sprinkler heads which effectively irrigates their entire yard. This has cost the HOA at least $80,000 over the past 10 years. The situation was remedied briefly by the rare election of new Board members. However, the offending Board members were reelected and immediately set to work spending large sums of money to reconnect to the irrigation and commence their free landscape easement maintenance. Naturally, the rest of their yard is maintained by the HOA landscape company at a huge discount. Our covenants say this mainteance is left to the discretion of the HOA Board and these self-dealing members get reelected as they reward the HOA members voting for them with special favors at the expense of the Association. All the while the other many landscape easements are totally maintained by the individual homeowner. What will remedy this? The offending Board members have no shame.

Not in this subdivision -- we don't. It is probably a good idea here for votes to be controlled by address/lot number as other issues members were allowed to vote on were suspected of fraud. Our developer controlled voting at first and we think those ballots were never counted & just went in the trash. Our first Board election was controlled by the declarant & his appointed Board. That was suspected of fraud and no one but those on the appointd Board and the developer saw the ballots.

If you're relating the Board's behavior accurately, some directors are indeed guilty of self dealing and have voted when they have a conflict of interest between what benefits them individually, and what benefits your HOA as a whole. But I'm not in the legals professions. Perhaps you can rally a bunch of your neighbors to chip in to hire an attorney to send a letter to the board to cease & desist with their illegal behaviors and to over turn decisions made out of self interest.

Otherwise, again with a lot of support from other HOA members, try to get them voted out again or try for a recall. But do read your GA statutes to see if you must have secret ballots or not. In some states like CA, a double envelope system is used whereby the owners name & HOA address is on an outer envelope. That info is compared with a list of eligible owners, the address is checked of and the outer envelopes are discarded. Then all at one time, all inner envelopes are opened and the ballots counted in view of any homeowner who wishes to observe.

But it all may be very different in GA HOA legislation.