Frustrated in Florida

I have been a condominium owner for 10 years at a condominium in St Petersburg Florida and have obeyed all the rules and regulations from our condo documents. I am also current with all monthly HOA fees . The board for the last 2 years have allowed unauthorized changes to the common areas. For example, one unit owner has a birdfeeder and it is attracting rodents, one unit owner has placed rubber mulch around the hedges, placed plastic lawn skirting in the front and rear areas of his condo unit, another has been leaving personal items outside his unit in the common area. There has also been conflict of interest by board member paying a maintenance man that was also his renter in one of his rental properties and that has never been addressed. This board member is still on the present board.
We also have a requirement for only two cars per unit owner and there a several unit owners with 3 plus cars. Board members are not upholding their fiduciary duties and are
selectively enforcing rules and requlations and allowing some unit owners to blatantly disregard our rules and regulations.
I have sent letters to the board as well as the management company but the violations.
Multiple condo unit owners are not held accountable for breaking our rules and regulations and they
are also members of the current condo board.
On March 22nd the board met and they voted to remove existing President who was working to resolve the issues stated above and replace her as president with the board member that had the conflict of interest and he has also not returned the funds in question. Both of these board members at a minimum have violated their fiduciary duties as officers of the board.
I have experienced harassment and car has been vandalized.
Any suggestions for resolution to the issues?

I wish I could tell you that this isn't common and that these issues are easily and quickly resolved, but it's just the opposite.

The real solution to situations like this usually involves informed homeowners who won't put up with what's going on and who decide to elect board members who will do their jobs.

Realistically, if you don't have enough neighbors who see things your way, it will be hard to make that happen. Then you're left with a choice: live with it or move. If you do have enough allies, you and they are in for a long, hard slog that will involve lots of work and lots of aggravation. Are you willing to serve on the board yourself? That's often what it comes down to, and I can tell you that being a board member is a lot harder than you can imagine if you've never done it before.

And many of us on this site will tell you that even if you succeed in removing an entrenched group of lousy directors and you manage to straighten things out after a number of years, these positive changes often come unglued after you step down from the board. You pretty much have to stay on the board in order to protect the community from the bad actors, and not everyone is up for that. The good, hard-working directors tend to burn out.

I know that Florida allows for mediation and arbitration for disputes in condo communities, but it will still come down to whether you'd be willing to spend the time, money, and energy on something that may not give you the resolution you want.

Bottom line: moving is often the easiest, cheapest, and fastest solution. Unless there is something uniquely wonderful about your community that you can't find elsewhere and all this wonderfulness outweighs the negatives that go along with it, then moving is a reasonable option.

Yeah, that's OK as long as the maintenance man is doing the extra work as a paid side hustle. If he is on salary and he does the extra work as a freebie, or while he's on the clock, that's a problem - although it's more of an employment issue for the association, rather than a conflict of interest.

An example of a true conflict of interest is a board member owning a landscaping company, bidding on the HOA's contract, and participating in the discussion and vote when the board awards the contract. (We've had discussions before on whether it's "fair" to the board member to exclude his company from bidding on the job, even if he recuses himself on all decision making. Personal opinion: board members should avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing, and just the fact that he owns the company will influence the decision to some extent. It could also affect the quality of work that gets done, although that's a separate issue.)