Illegal practices by Board and MC

Hi, We are party of a very large HOA of over 250 units. The current board (they are all friends are relatives) decided remove the existing MC and hire a newly established company by one of the board member. The HOA attorney send us a letter stating that board decision and gave us the option to file a petition of take that decision through a homeowner voting.

I submitted the petition to the attorney and he never replied to me. In the mean time the board member who owns the MC did the signature verification and send the list to the only board member who also supported petition. The petition was signed by over 27% of the unit owners. She invalidated enough signature that it came just under 20% unit owners.

The question is: Since she is the subject of the petition, is she qualified to do the signature?
1. Against what signature can they compare and say that its a bad signature.
2. Does the association or the attorney has a responsibility to respond to the person who submitted the petition.
3. Can I take them to court to force the HOA to honor the petition?. If the count allow the petition and if we disqualify her as a property manager, can we go after recouping the management fees she collected (she has been collecting over 150K on an annualized basis and using club house to run her business)?
4. We don't even know the name of the property management company. How can I get it (I tried searching company records with her name and address and did return nothing).
5. The current board is following illegal and unethical practices. For example they are spreading the news that the new units coming to the market cannot be bought by investors. There is no Bylaws to support this. If you are selling, you cannot sell your unit to investors. But we found that the units that are not rentable are being bought buy three of the board members for investment purposes. This includes the board member who owns the MC (who is also a Realtor). They are pretty good at committing this fraud as they will never give any written instructions to the listing agents.

Also all the units listed today are “not-rentable”. This is a well coerced plan to scare away investors and low-ball the unit prices and eventually own them all. The careless listing agents are falling in their lies and these guys are buying the units for themselves.
What is the best way to expose them to the authorities.

I like to get your response in private. as this could impact our plans to deal with the situation. Please emial your response to [email protected]

Thanks,
VP

Vela

Generally a petition has no standing other than it is informational. Generally to cancel a contract the BOD has entered into would require recalling some or all of the BOD then having the new BOD revote on the contract. I know of no way a member's petition can cause a contract to be cancelled.

There are methods for owners to call special meetings and override BOD decisions but that will generally take at least 51% of all owners (at the meeting or not) voting to override. You have only shown the ability to get 27% or less and that was simply asking them to sign a petition, not calling for and attending a special meeting.

This is exactly we have been trying to do. The petition is to call the meeting. If meeting is held, then I just need a simple majority of the whose who attended the meeting and not support of 51% of the unit owner.. is that right?

The way I'm reading it, you are correct. You need to have 20% of the membership sign the petition. The members need not be in good standing, simply be a member to sign the petition.

Members not in good standing (delinquent on payments) might not be able to vote, but the can sign the petition to force a vote. I would insist on knowing what names were invalidated and why. You should insist on this in writing and have the response in writing. You may need an attorney to write the request on your behalf in order to get the Board to respond (based on what you are posting here). Reason being that if needed, such a request would be part of any legal action to force a meeting.

From my understanding of the statute (and I am not an attorney) I would agree with your interpretation that you need a simple majority of votes cast at the meeting to overturn the contract.