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Posted By BoardM3 on 05/09/2020 8:04 PM
Thank you all - please do not spend any more of your valuable time researching this question, I feel guilty taking your time.
I received a call from the board President today, who bullied me and said I need to stick to my role as Secretary and only take notes at meetings. The President told me it is not my role to provide community improvement ideas to the board for consideration, and to know my place. After this call, and much consideration, I've decided to resign the position. If the board was set up in such a manner that all members had a voice on important decisions, a true 1:5 voting representation, then there would be a chance for me to make positive changes. However, the President has decided to make important community decisions without the input of the board (or certain members of the board) and is actively blocking my attempts to learn about the corporation. I believe the President and friends perceive me as a threat to their power over this community because I requested a voice in some decisions that are being made. I attempted to make it clear that even if I am out-voted, that is OK, as long as I am heard. Today, the board has no defined method of determining which decisions the President can make alone, which ones require board input via email, and which need to be voted on in a public meeting. I genuinely want to make the community a better place, but I simply cannot do so with the way it is set up today. There is extraordinarily little or no positive impact I can make in this role. Instead, my goal is to find an avenue to volunteer in an environment where my input is valued.
Thank you all.
No surprise, but your president is mis-informed. All board members have a say in all issues that the board decides - the president's vote doesn't count any more than anyone else's. It's a bit ironic that he's insisting that you stick to your secretarial duties, since one of them is communicating with the membership, and how can you do that without names, addresses and other contact info? He's undermining his own mistaken beliefs.
I can't remember who said it, but someone once commented that people who try to stifle others' ideas are people who don't have many ideas of their own.
That said, it's not unusual to have an enthusiastic new board member with lots of ideas, but the ideas are outside of the scope of the board's stated roles or authority. Or the ideas require new spending and the budget is already committed down to the last penny - new ideas require new funding. Or the new ideas would violate some state or federal law that new board members are unaware of. Or there are unintended consequences to these "new" ideas that experienced board members know about but the rookie does not.
I was in your board president's position a few years ago. We had a new board member who had no business experience and had no idea of what the directors of corporations actually do. But boy, did she ever have ideas, but without a clue as to how to pay for them (and she was furious at things we did to reduce expenses, such as holding off on minor repairs and doing a single bulk bid once a year to get best pricing). Or she wanted to fix things that weren't problems or do things that the board had no legal authority to do. And she was furious that the PM didn't ignore the board's vote and do what she wanted instead. In her mind, she had as much right to tell the PM what to do as the others did - she actually called up the owner of the property management company and complained that our PM wouldn't ignore the board's vote and do what she wanted instead (I swear I am not making this up).
If this is your first year on your first community association board, you have an unbelievable amount to learn and your first order of business is to do so. Don't forget about your new ideas, but start to re-evaluate them as you learn more about what an association board really does and the limitations of HOA finances. If you're a rookie and you don't feel like you're in over your head a good part of the time, then you're not learning.