HOA IS MIA

Please ready your HOA governing documents to become familiar with what is required of the Board. If you have a management company talk with them and find out any information that you can. Inquire as to when and where the Board meetings are held and attend. Hopefully there is a moment in the Board agenda that allows an owner to have some input and ask questions. You have every reason to be frustrated. Do some website research for some laws in your state to determine what has to be done by the Board. If you are self governed you will be more limited in receiving help than if you have a management company. A situation like this is hard for a perspective owner to know what the Board is like and how it governs before you buy.

This would be a good time to talk to some of your neighbors and see what they think. If they don't want an HOA, there needs to be a formal process to dissolve it - you don't just quit having meetings. You'll have to figure out what's going to happen with the entrance - who'll take care of that?

Before you get to the question of whether you should or shouldn't have a HOA, step one is to find out what this board has been up to - sure there are more people on it than the president. Find out where all the board members live and send all of them a letter expressing your concerns and ask for a meeting. If there's no response, the rest of you should meet anyway - and you should let the board (such as it is) know you will be meeting. Check your documents to see how this is done - if things get ugly, you should be able to say AND demonstrate you did things according to the documents and put the rest on the defensive.

You'll want to know things like why the rest of the board didn't carry on if the president wasn't available or why the president didn't resign if he or she found his/her health would prevent active participation, where's the money, what has it being spent on - and why haven't homeowners (who pay the bills) been informed about any of this?

You may need to vote in a new board, so you'll need to have homeowners willing to step up (and you may need to be one of them). If it comes to that, you'll need to get all the association records. You may end up with needing an attorney to blast some of this information out of some or all of the boad members, meaning the homeowners will need to chip in to pay for one.

Add this to Michael's suggestions and you see you have some work to do - good luck!