Can I sue a previous board for failing to follow the law?

I do not see anything that would qualify as damages under the law. So there's no money for which you could sue. (And stretches like, "Whah whah, property values went down because the Board was not trimming trees" are not going to fly.)

Plus your delay in pursuing the records in a court counts against you.

Plus the issue is now moot, so you would not even be able to receive injunctive relief.

Boards and managers unlawfully refusing to provide records is one of the biggest problems at HOAs/COAs.

Okay so correct how things are done NOW. This was the PM correct? Plus suing your HOA is suing yourself and your neighbors. For what? The papers you now have in your hands? Principal is an useless way to die on a sword.

Policies are nice, but rarely are they enforceable. Right now the only foolproof method of "enforcing" anything lies in the hands of the homeowners who can remove board members with or without cause. This is often a pain in the rear to do since there are precise legal hoops to jump through and you need to have enough homeowners who think this should happen.

The real problem is that board members often don't know what they're doing. They're chosen from among the pool of homeowners who don't have to know squat in order to buy a home. The really skilled and dedicated ones burn out fast, leaving you with folks who don't really want the job but somebody has to do it or the community will wind up in receivership. That's not how you get quality work.

If you want consistent and professional work out of your board members, they need to be professionals who sign a contract with the HOA to provide said work. Laws will have to change and homeowners will need to pay for this. As long as you're stuck with freebies from the Reluctant Amateurs Brigade, that's what you'll get. Suing only makes financial sense if the board has done something so wrong that there are significant bucks on the line.

I agree 100% which is why you need a written policy and a signed ethics agreement so homeowners can be shown that the board ignored the written policy even though they signed an agreement to abide by it that way it's very easy to prove they were negligent and need to be replaced

Opinions on these things differ.

I personally don't think a signed policy is proof of anything. I think they're window dressing - responsible and ethical board members already are behaving well, and the bad actors aren't going to be stopped by an unenforceable piece of paper if they can't be persuaded by laws and contracts. A signed code of conduct can give homeowners a false sense of security, and may make them pay even less attention to what the board is up to.

Some lawyers also have said that a signed code of conduct may make the board ineligible for the business judgement defense since they're agreeing ahead of time to behave in a certain way. These lawyers discourage their clients from signing anything like this.

And you have the pragmatic issue that, unless such a code is required by state law, no board has the authority to tell future boards what to do. Those future boards can amend the code or chuck the thing out altogether.

Finally no set of laws or provisions or codes of conduct will cover all of the circumstances that a board will face. Sometimes you're stuck with a few not-great options, or you're dealing with competing rights instead of clear-cut right vs. wrong - and tying your hands may eliminate some options before you even know what they are. It's why the business judgement defense exists - to allow for the unpredictable and the gnarly stuff that won't fit into a pre-determined formula that spits out a nice, neat "Do This" result.