Homeowner sending derivative demand letter to board via building-wide email group

This isn't procedure. Recalling the President or other board member has it's own process. Find out what it is and that has to be followed lawsuit or no lawsuit.

Let the chips fall where they do. That said if my BOD received such a letter we would do two things. One ignore it. Two, hand it over to our attorney as FYI and advise him to take no action yet.

Well said. Let the accuser legally step forward or get lost.

The claims in the letter include (1) audio recording of people in the building, by the board president, and an allegation that audio recording is illegal (as there was no notice, and the letter included an email from the property manager admitting to the audio recording) and (2) insider dealings not being reported as required by NY law.

No, they are adversaries whether the accusations are true or not. If you are hit with a lawsuit, you must respond via proper legal channels even if you believe the lawsuit is frivolous, which forces you to spend time and money dealing with the suit. (Getting a little far afield, see "patent trolling" and other nuisance lawsuits as money-making schemes.) A lawsuit against the HOA will force the association to spend money that is needed for other purposes, and this harms everyone. This is true regardless of the merits of the accusations.

Unless there is something unusual going on, such as big money interests controlling the board, then bad board members are always the fault of the homeowners who won't get their acts together and remove them. Suing the board to make them remove the president is stupid. Simply removing him from his officer position won't get him off the board, and I can tell you stories about how impossible it is to rein in someone who is determined to act as they please. If the homeowners are unwilling to do the hard work to properly hold a recall vote, then "the people have spoken".

In this case, then, a lawsuit is a way to force your will onto a board and a community that won't do things your way. Believing that your fellow homeowners are irresponsible fools doesn't change this - the laws are what they are, and that's what you signed on for when you bought into an HOA.

And all these lawsuit-happy folks need to consider what would happen should their HOA become uninsurable as a result of all the legal wrangling. Hint: they won't enjoy it. Responsible board members DO worry about things like loss of insurance, which is why they tend to "treat the witness as hostile" whenever a homeowner starts slinging threats to sue.

(For what it's worth, the few times we were threatened with lawsuits, the owners either didn't understand what they were looking at, believed that the board should do something that it was not legally able to do, or believed that the board should not do something it was legally obligated to do.)

You finally moved out, say you love, love love your new home and the HOA it's located in. Why, then, do you continue to post about this one??????

I wouldn't give two damns about what happened to this community once I moved out, especially if I had to sue it in order to get them to behave. I'm beginning to think you're a drama who really loves stirring things up. Or you still haven't figure how to evict the folks who've taken up too much of your brain matter.

If your former neighbors are at a loss on how to deal with this board, you could encourage them to post here and get some ideas - they're adults and probably know a lot more about the current shitstorm than you. In the meantime, enjoy your new home and forget about this.

SheilaH, if there's a way for you to block my posts, I would encourage you to do so. I find it interesting that others are finally waking up in the bad HOA.

I'm not the one who sent the demand letter. Nor am I involved. I just find it interesting and entertaining, in an odd way.

I do love my new HOA--it's WONDERFUL. I have nothing to post about it since it's fantastic, although I was intrigued by the remote-controlled elevators.

I do have contempt for those who use lawsuits as an end run around the processes laid out in our governing docs and state laws. Otherwise, it's exasperation with those whose response to any perceived "victimization" is a lawsuit (and I used those quotation marks deliberately).

I think I've been on record often enough with comments about incompetent and deliberately bad board members. And there are absolutely times when a lawsuit is the only option: nothing else will address what's going on (for example, a board member embezzled funds). In my opinion, the items cited by the OP probably don't meet that standard, mainly because the law already provides for other, less costly and impactful ways of days of dealing with the issues. If the other options have been tried and have failed *for reasons outside of the homeowners' control* then I may change my mind, although it depends on the nature of the alleged wrong.

My main objection to lawsuits in HOAs is that there is always unavoidable collateral damage. People who had nothing to do with the situation - who knew nothing about it, and who may even have been harmed themselves by whatever wrong the suit claims to address - will pay the cost for the lawsuit. In cases of embezzlement, clearly everyone was harmed pretty much equally and will benefit equally if the suit is successful. I'm fine with that. Where I have issues is with the lawsuit that will benefit only certain persons at the expense of everyone in the association. Or where the supposed benefit provided by the lawsuit does not outweigh the costs. Obviously this last one is a judgement call and different people will have different opinions.

As for the accusations summarized in the OP, my personal opinion is that - regardless of any privacy laws - I should assume that I'm under surveillance when I'm outside my home and should behave accordingly. (If I use/wear any "smart" devices, I should also assume I'm under surveillance when I'm *inside* my home as well, but that's a different discussion.) This says nothing at all about whether I think this is OK or illegal or the end of civilization as we know it - it just says that I recognize the facts as they currently are and act on this knowledge.

In my state, condo owners have no expectation of privacy when we're outside of our units - so something like a hidden audio recorder would not surprise or upset many of us. This will color our opinions of a potentially expensive lawsuit, whose costs we personally will bear, because no one warned us about some devices that we already assume may be there.

(By the by, I disagree about sewage backing up being the board's fault. It is definitely and always the board's responsibility. But it only becomes their fault if it results from negligence or something within the board's control. The few times we've had a sewage backups, it was because somebody was flushing things down low-flow toilets that didn't belong there and causing a clog. Unfortunately, the guilty parties' neighbors were the ones who ended up with sewage in their homes. That's one of the risks of living in multi-unit buildings, and no one's fault except for maybe those who peddle low-flow toilet systems.)

"My main objection to lawsuits in HOAs is that there is always unavoidable collateral damage. People who had nothing to do with the situation - who knew nothing about it, and who may even have been harmed themselves by whatever wrong the suit claims to address - will pay the cost for the lawsuit."

The section I quoted above really bothers me. Let me give you a real life example. There is a resident in our community that experienced flooding. It ruined all the floors on her first floor, all the base trim and sections of the drywall. The cause of the flooding was a drainage issue that the HOA was responsible for. The Board did not deny this but refused to repair the damage because they didn't have the money. (Fees had not been adjusted correctly for years and years.) The owner reluctantly accepted their answer and spent thousands of dollars making the repairs. Three years later the same thing happened and she was flooded again. Once again the existing Board openly admitted the HOA was responsible but said, "sorry, we don't have the money." By now she was really pissed but backed down again and paid for the repairs herself. Last year after I became president of the Board she was flooded for the third time. By now she was beyond pissed and made it clear that we either fix it or she would sue. I did not know about the history but was simply appalled by how she had been treated. We shifted money from different parts of the budget and fixed her problem.

This is a clear case where she should have sued the HOA previously. She pays her monthly fee every month and deserves to get the services and benefits that she is paying for. The fact that our HOA never budgeted properly and wouldn't raise assessments because they were afraid of being seen as the bad guy is not her problem. Had she sued the first time maybe the Board would have gotten their crap together which would have helped some of the problems that we are now left to clean up. You are correct that had she sued, all residents would have to pay for it. In this case that doesn't bother me one bit. Maybe if all the residents hadn't been so apathetic they would have gotten off their butts and done something about the incompetent Boards that had been running the place for years and years.

The worse thing is after being on the Board for 2 years and doing a lot of research and reading the posts on this forum I think I'm right when I say examples like I just gave are not all that rare.

Nice anecdote, JohnT38. Quite interesting.

You may call me whatever you want. I don’t care.

This confuses me. As I understand it, the owner should have filed a claim under her insurance and let her insurance company deal with the HOA. Why was she dealing with the HOA?

The multiple question marks was for emphasis - got your attention, didn't it?

Yes, humans are fascinating as hell and it's always interesting to see what prompts people to finally say enough (e.g. the current protests against police brutality). That said, I find it nearly impossible to swallow something I just spat out. If I fought the good fight and won, I move on because I need my energy to recover. If I lose, I still need my energy to review what worked and didn't so I can fight another day - or conclude I've done all I can, and perhaps its time to walk away and let time and history prove whether I was right, kinda right or flat out wrong. You cannot move on if you keep rehashing the same crap over and over and over again, and life's too short for all that.

In this case, I'm glad the homeowner has alerted other homeowners about her concerns, although I agree with Cathy it's more appropriate to call for a special meeting (or several) and hash all of this stuff out. If the president really is a maniac, hopefully it ends with his being tossed from the board. In fact I'd get rid of all of them because they've done nothing to reel him in. The only response to bad behavior I've heard about is Paul's previous conversation about the board member who secretly recorded the president calling certain people out of their names and then sharing it with "a few people" - because HE didn't have to guts to stand up and tell the guy to take a chill pill (or several).

What will it take for these people to finally say enough is enough? Where was this homeowner when Paul filed his lawsuit - the fact the association got its butt handed to them in court should have prompted someone to ask some serious questions as to why things got to this point and demanded answers from the board. That didn't happen and if a lawsuit and paying out association money doesn't convince everyone a change is necessary, I don't know what will.

In the meantime, if I'm out of the muck, I'm not jumping back in and I sure as hell don't find anything remotely entertaining about watching a trainwreck because real people get hurt. But Paul, if you think this is funny or whatever, do you.

Also, there's no point in calling a special meeting; the board will just deny the validity of the proxies or something and refuse to hold it. That's what happened each time someone who the property manager didn't like had enough votes to get elected to the board: the board would just say that there wasn't a quorum and would destroy the proxies. The property manager runs the elections and meetings and picks the board.

SheilaH, if I posted two things that conflicted, please point it out clearly. Otherwise, I am not following your post.

In the HOA, most owners are apathetic. A lot of them keep places in the HOA as apartments that they rent out OR they just own apartments there as second homes.

Conversely, the property manager is owned by an owner that owns about 7% of the apartments in the HOA, and he employs people I view as thugs in the property manager's office.

Apathetic/busy owners vs. NYC thugs. Who would win that? Strength in numbers does no good because the property manager's thugs simply destroy records and scream at people if they come to an annual meeting and try to criticize anything.

So glad I finally live in a truly wonderful HOA, not the one described above.

Based on experience, that can change in the blink of an eye.