Board invited mgmt comp to special meeting to rplace them

On the one hand, the manager is not an owner. He has no legal right to attend. Your concerns that people will be chilled into silence have merit. I think you are within your legal rights to ask that he not be present.

On the other hand, there are defamation concerns. I realize you believe every claim you make about this manager is fact. But I personally do not know the law on background checks and what may be revealed. It's one thing for information to be freely available to all on the net. It's another thing to pay money for a background check; find out information; and then reveal it to the public (and let's face it, a meeting of owners is essentially 'the public').

I think it is a trial of sorts. I know you think this guy is a jerk, but this is only your view. This person's livelihood is on the line. Fairness demands that he be allowed to defend himself. Off the top of my head, I would consider revealing to the manager exactly what you are going to reveal at the Special Meeting. Offer him the chance to defend himself but only in writing. State that you will present his written statement at the meeting. Even using this approach I think this is something of a minefield.

The way you write about this manager here, I have grave concerns that you will be getting a letter from this manager's attorney and have to lawyer up yourself. It's not about whether he would win or lose in court. It's about you having to respond to a lawsuit threat (or actual lawsuit), and paying thousands of dollars to an attorney. Plaintiffs can often, completely lawfully use lawsuits to harass, make people suffer, and shut down debate, even if the plaintiff's main claim lacks merit.

If the manager loses his contract with the HOA, there's no question that he will suffer damages (meaning quantifiable financial losses) due to what you said. Your facts have to be iron-clad legally. The facts must not merely true, but also allowed to be presented to the public (and so the facts are not "private").

What ElleN said.

If people are this upset about the property manager, the appropriate thing to do would be to come up with a list of problems that seemed to come up over and over - being abrasive to homeowners could have been one. The Board should have had a meeting with the property manager (and his/her supervisor, if appropriate) to discuss these concerns, so they could give their side, and come up with an approach to address them. consider it a type of performance improvement plan like some employees get when there's been one mishap after another.

Give the property manager six months to clean up his act and if it doesn't happen, then you can talk about replacement. If there are several managers with the company, maybe your community could be reassigned. Otherwise, read the management company agreement to see what it says about terminating services, follow those instructions and get the association attorney in the loop so he or she can ensure both sides are doing what they're supposed to do.

That's the professional way, but in this case, I get the feeling you've made this personal, as ElleN noted in your posts. That will backfire on you big time if you're not careful, so you need to get hold of yourself and focus on the problem, not the personality. After all, if the manager is abrasive as you say, did it ever occur to you that perhaps some homeowners started it because they emailed or called using all sorts of crazy languages, shouting, making threats, etc.? It may be that some homeowners are going to have to control themselves as well before contacting the property manager about a problem.

You got all this started, so you should be adult enough to tell the property manager your concerns so he can respond.

I've been in this situation and have learned from it.

If the board is "alpha" enough to bring the manager into an open meeting to discuss management services, so be it. However, I'd construct a meeting where the dues payers are most comfortable.

Secondly and most importantly, the HOA board should exercise caution in holding a meeting for the purpose of "firing" a vendor in mid-contract. If the manager is fulfilling the terms of the service contract (and being irritable is not a reason for firing mid-contract), the HOA board could be challenged to pay out the full contract amount to complete the contract and end the relationship.

On management matters, it's usually worth the wait to ride out a contract and not renew it. The drama of a special meeting is not worth it. Trust me.

So we don’t have to search for your old post, Lynn: Are you on The board? As defined in your Bylaws, is this a special meeting of the board? Or special meeting of the members?

What does your agenda on this matter say? If you have a handout for owners, Shelia and ElleN’s warning might be appropriate. Do not accuse him of any violations of his contract in the handout unless you have hard proof.

So far as I know, there’s no requirement to invite him to the meeting UNLESS your contract states that e must be invited to all meetings of the Board and of he members.

Btw, what do you hope to accomplish with this meeting?

Well said. The membership does not have the authority to fire/change the PM. Only the BOD does.

A few years back I was on the board of a townhome HOA whose management company was installed by the developer years prior. Years passed, homeowner apathy became as strong as the management company became bold and unsupervised. It was a family owned company that did not have the criminal concerns that you have about yours but they were essentially absentee and minimalist in all things. Our board members were accustomed to not having board meetings and we discussed it off line and we decided we needed change. We also assessed that with homeowner apathy being so strong, that a change in management company would not incite significant push back so we requested requests for proposals from many companies then hired a very good HOA attorney that was not affiliated with our management company. He reviewed our process for making the selection and informing the long standing current company and we followed his advice to a T. We were very afraid of being sued by the management company because he was harsh and bold and very comfortable with his contract. In the end, he dropped us like a hot potato once we told him and refused to provide us or the new company all the records as "they were proprietary." He did provide some but a lot of the financials and "guts" of management were not transferred. But the good news was that it confirmed we had done the right thing and the new company had great processes and within about 6 months had a firm grasp on all. We told him of our decision in person with the board only present. We announced it in a special meeting to the community after we told him. Everyone understood and was impressed by the process. The attorney did NOT charge us to review our process as we were potential future clients n it was not labor intensive.

Hello. I didn't realize you all responded. I did not get any emails to alert me. No, I am not on the board. I started a petition in the community and we're calling a special meeting to ask the board not to renew the contract after the one year is up. The year ends June 1st.
Our bylaws say that a contract can be canceled at any time for cause or for no reason at all. I would never have started this, except he was nasty to me. He was nasty to my sister. He was nasty to an 86 year old woman at a meeting in February who was concerned about not getting any mail or e-mails from the mgmt co. Our community email list only covers about 45% of the H/O so Quarterly bills and election ballots should go out in the mail. He doesn't want to waste time sending any letter mail out. (That includes collection letters for people in arrears and people breaking rules.) Our arrears list is up to 24% of H/o.
It is a three person company and he runs it. His claim is he's a marine. He has no accounting or business background, and cannot do a balance sheet. First time he left accounts receivable off the balance sheet. The second time he subtracted them from the assets.
He only sent. Emails to half the community for the BOD election in October. He didn't feel like putting letters into envelopes and into the mail. only the current members ran and were all re-elected Because no new candidates were canvassed to run.
I don't want to be sued, as he is obviously pretty litigious.
He's been evicted for non-payment of rent about four time. He's been charged 6 to 8 times for fraudulent checks in the past. He's been charged with lewd behavior in public and malfeasance, misconduct in office. I don't feel I'm overreacting and asking that this man be replaced. We've switched management companies over six times in 15 years. And I actually liked all of the other companies.

ElleN has made me nervous...And as far as JohnC46's reply goes, This contract ends June 1st. I was asking the board since March to simply not renew, but they're digging their heels in because they like this man. He gives them full power to do what they want.
30 people (over 10 % HOA) signed a petition to discuss it. You feel it's a useless meeting, but we cannot just cancel. Right?
We probably will meet for 20 minutes discuss it and then it's in the 5 board
member's hands to do what they decide.

Again thanks to you all for being on this forum.

+1000

It's always been in the board's hands. They are the ones running the show here, or they should be. If this manager is so bad, it sounds like the board did not investigate before hiring him. If this is so, the failure is with the board and homeowners should be working to elect more capable directors.

About ten years ago we had a small group of homeowners who wanted to replace our management company with a different one. The board president agreed with them, the other two directors didn't want to because they worried that the manager we had would be fired for losing the account. (Entirely possible, top management at that company were bullies, but that's not the board's problem to solve and should not factor into a decision of what's best for the community.) Solution: the group of homeowners convinced a wiling person to seek election, that person won, so they and the board president were a majority who could vote to change companies. It was a bit of work, but that's how you do things. A number of the regular posters here have similar stories to tell.

Heads up: If the manager at the OP's community is really that awful, the transition to a new company may not go smoothly. Some planning is in order, with the top priority putting control of the money in the board's hands (bank accounts and financial records) in case the manager gets angry and stomps out with no notice. We've heard stories of former management companies holding an association's records hostage after they were removed, so it's always something to be aware of. And occasionally managers who feel aggrieved sue the association. - they'd almost have to if they were falsely accused of something. To be fair, things can go sideways with a disgruntled ex-board member/treasurer as well, so I'm not just dunking on management companies.

Moral of the story: things can always get worse if those in control don't know what they're doing.

All your advice and opinions are helpful. Our last election, October 2022, was for all five vacant board seats. 1 seat was for 1yr ; 2 seats were for 2 yrs and 2 for 3yrs. They ran un-opposed and will be here for a while.
And yes, according to our bylaws, they can cancel him in the future, even if they don't do it in the next two to three months. So I will be optimistic on this. All I can do is stay calm and whisper in their ears.