Adding more Board Members

Can you all help me please. Our community is a 98 home community with 3 members. 2 of the members are best friends and the 3rd person is the 3rd person in that position because the last 2 have felt out voted with all decisions made. They have been told that basically they are just a secretary and must be ok with "documenting" their decisions. Is there a way to add more board members so that it is not always a 2 vs 1? Thank you all so much!

Creating new board positions won't fix the problem of bad board members - you may end up with even more of them. And for a small community (under 100 homes), three seems reasonable. If you increase the number of positions, you'll have the problem of trying to fill all of them. If you can't find enough volunteers, you'll have to worry about not having a quorum which means the board can't do business.

Besides which, it costs money to try to amend your governing docs, and you have no guarantee that you'd be successful.

The correct process is to replace the two people who you believe are doing a bad job. (Are they? Are they making bad decisions, or do some people just not like the decisions that are being made?)

Just to add some more color to this sort of situation:

In my community we have 3 board members who serve staggered 3 year terms, with one term expiring every year. A couple years back we got a new board member who believed that she should be able to do exactly as she pleased, condo law and finances be d@mned. (At one point she even called the owner of our property management company and told him that the PM should do what she wanted and ignore what the two experienced board members had voted on. I kid you not.)

In other words, this sort of two vs. one dynamic is not unusual. It may also be perfectly fine depending on what's actually going on.

People who have never served on an association board have some shaky ideas about how a community association actually works and what the board's function is. In my experience, the angriest owners usually were angry that the board was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. For example, they believed that the board shouldn't fund our reserves because they didn't think they should have to pay for new roofs for future owners. (Come to think of it, the new board member I mentioned two paragraphs ago also believes that, despite being told repeatedly that Ohio condo law requires funding the reserves in accordance with the most recent reserve study. I wish I were joking...)

So... if someone believes that they should replace some board members, they need to 1) educate themselves to make sure they truly understand what's going on, 2) educate themselves about the proper procedures for removing board members (hint: look in your by-laws), and 3) start talking to the neighbors to develop support for replacing the current board, including finding people who would be willing to serve in their place. Oh, and 4) prepare to have an eye-opening experience.

Wow, you've given me alot to think about. The new secretary is my spouse. We have a brand new board. We are a new community and the current management company just gave it over the community company. There are outrageous quotes for landscaping and pool that we have gotten quoted for (on the down low) and we showed it to the other 2 board members and they refused to even consider them. They are ok with us paying too much and the HOA fees just went up 50%. The community was not happy at all. When we went to our annual meeting. Everyone had submitted questions beforehand and none were answered. Only voting for the secretary. The current members have very strong personalities and also govern our FB page. They don't let people post freely and censor everything posted. That is why we decided to ru to hopefully change things.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Chris

Most Bylaw will say something like a BOD consisting of 3 to 7 members and leaving it up to the BOD. We have chosen to set BOD size at 5 but have been known to run with just 3. I for one do not like spouse's serving together on a BOD.

I'm confused too, Chris. What, for instance, does this mean: "We are a new community and the current management company just gave it over the community company." Does it mean your developer turned the HOA over to the Owners??? Put another way, what is a "community company?"

Your spouse needs to put various things, like quotes for landscaping, on a board meeting agenda for the board to discuss. Do you have open board meetings that owners may attend? I don't know if GA requires open board meetings.

What you mean to say is you have three bar members, not "members." "Members" are owners. But it sounds like the Members (all owners) voted for the position of secretary. but in most HOAs, the members vote for board members and the the board members or directors vote for the officers, e.g., president, secretary. this is why we need to see your bylaws (or maybe CC&Rs) to review how many directors you should have and what officers you should have.

If the members voted your wife to be a director, then she certainly has a vote on the board for every item.

Sorry to confuse everyone. There are 3 members in our HOA board. The President, Vice and Secretary. The president quit so everyone moved up the ladder and she was voted in as secretary. Our HOA is new per say because the builders appointed our management company and just recently handed it over to the homeowners. We still have the same management company that the builders began the subdivision with. My wife has attended 2 monthly meetings and no, the non BOA homeowners are not invited to these meetings. She was in shock over the things they were approving and she was the no vote but since the other two vote yes, then she feels like she has no voice. I am not on the board, I am simply trying to find solutions to these issues. No one but the president and vice president get to make decisions. The community isnt happy so would I get someone to start a petition to take off the 2 members. There are others willing to take their places. Would that make it obvious that it is my wife and I's idea and she could lose her position on the board? Thank you all. You don't know how much we appreciate all your feedback.

If your wife is new to serving on a community association board, then she will typically spend her first year discovering just how little she knows about the process. If she thinks that she has a firm grip on things after two monthly meetings, then she is mistaken. In my experience a new board member will spend their first year feeling overwhelmed and wondering what the heck they've gotten themselves into. In the second year they've gotten their feet under them and are really learning the ropes, and in the third year they begin to fire on all cylinders.

If a first year board member assumes that she knows better than the experienced board members, she is almost certainly wrong. It's not impossible that those board members are clueless - it happens, especially in communities just out of developer control. But assuming that is premature, especially since you've provided no examples of what you think is so shocking. The angriest homeowners (and board members) I've come across have also been the least knowledgeable about HOA living and what the board's function is.

One of the things you don't know is that your wife can't "lose" her position on the board unless the homeowners vote her off in accordance with your by-laws. She can be removed from her officer position (secretary) but that doesn't mean she's off the board. Board members serve at the pleasure of the homeowners, and can be recalled with or without cause.

I also Googled Georgia's Sunshine Laws, and it appears that community associations are exempt. This means that board meetings do not have to be open to the members unless your governing docs state otherwise. (Hopefully one of our Georgia posters will chime in if I'm wrong about that.)

And I'll repeat something I said earlier: it's not unusual to have split votes on a 3-person board. Boards usually have an odd number of directors in order to break tie votes. If board decisions are always unanimous, then I'd suspect that maybe things aren't functioning as they should, but a split vote is fine.

I strongly recommend you and your wife thoroughly read your governing documents, including the by-laws. They are the bible for how your community needs to function, and board members should have good working knowledge of all of it.