Unhappy Homeowners and Removing Board Members

By request...

I mentioned in a different thread that my community experienced what can happen when a group of disgruntled homeowners believe that the current board isn't doing a good job and they want change.

I've also commented in the past that many times homeowners are unhappy about things that are normal business practices in a community association. They expect a democracy or a social organization, but what they've bought into is a corporation. They want change, but don't understand is that what they want violates CC&Rs or state laws.

Or they maybe do have a better idea of how things should run, but they don't understand the proper steps to make that happen.

So they basically throw a tantrum.

Details of we experienced

In our case, what that boiled down to was constant criticism of the board but without actually volunteering to serve on the board themselves. This culminated in blowing up the 2023 annual meeting. Many loud words were said, the one candidate for the open board positions said "not for me" and walked out, and after the meeting was adjourned the remaining board member resigned. Voila: we got no board! Oh boy!

I wasn't at the meeting (still hiding from covid at that point). But from what I learned afterwards, our activist group's criticisms were a mixture of some legitimate issues, a misunderstanding of how condo associations operate, disagreeing with how the then-current board was doing things, and just causing turmoil for the heck of it. The legitimate issue was the management company, which was not great. The board at the time also wasn't knocking things out of the ball park - but they weren't doing much that was terribly wrong either. The lights were on, water came out of the faucets, trash got picked up, the landscape and snow removal crews did a good job, bills got paid, and tax returns were filed.

The driving force behind much of this, I suspect, was a small group of what I've referred to as "vocational dissidents". They disagree with the board for the sake of disagreement. I'd dealt with them when I served on the board several years earlier, and I knew how to manage them. The board in 2023 did not - and so this group was jerking them around and distracting them from their jobs. No wonder they weren't totally on top of things.

In short, 2023 board could have done a better job. But an inexperienced board could do worse - which happened.

The community got itself organized and several months later held a special meeting to try to elect a new board. Great turnout, eight people threw their names into the ring, and we ended up electing three members of the activist group. One was a dictatorial bully, one was a former board member, and the third was an inexperienced person who actually had the right temperament for being a successful board member. Drama ensued.

After a few months, the first two fell out and the bully ousted the former board member. Bully refused to appoint someone to the open position. Also made some very dumb decisions (and I won't get into details about that). And then resigned after six months on the job (when details about some of the decisions were starting to surface). Fortunately prior to the resignation, we'd had another annual meeting, and a third board member was elected who had - OMG - real skills!

So we had a functioning two-person board. They approached me and another owner to fill the open position. I suggested that they appoint the other person and name me as a non-voting officer whose main function was providing the information I'd accumulated over many years of living in the community and serving on condo association boards. This worked well. The person who was elected in 2023 ended up stepping down for personal reasons, and I agreed to fill the open position. So here we are: what appears to be a stable three-person board, we all listen to each other, we've navigated some challenges, and we all agree to comply with the requirements of the CTA. I call that a result.

Summary, or why I think the efforts of activist groups can go astray

* Many are inexperienced.

* They can't always tell the difference between things that are normal business practices, things that should be corrected, and things that aren't really wrong. Not liking something isn't by itself a reason for change.

* Activist groups attract the vocational dissident types who tend to drive things in the wrong direction.

* Communities thrive on stability (as long as things are working more or less correctly). Being jerked around by people who want drama is counterproductive. (Our new community manager - yes, we have one! - told us we were the most chaotic transition she's had to deal with in her career. I put the blame squarely on the activist group that thrived on turmoil, continued that when they were on the board, didn't know what they were doing, and made it impossible for the inexperienced board member to learn the ropes. One of my goals has been to calm things down so that we can deal thoughtfully with the real challenges we have.)

In short, understand why the activists are doing what they're doing. Do they have legitimate concerns, and are these worth correcting? Do they have the knowledge and skills they need to change course? Or will they make new mistakes of their own that may be worse? (This is very common since so much of board service is on-the-job training.) Or is the group being driven by some trouble makers who enjoy turmoil and who will bring that onto the board - which suggests maybe slowing down and taking a hard look at what they're actually saying?

So.....from what've I've seen in my HOA, served with over 30 directors over 14 years, had about a dozen HOA presidents, and attended Board meetings religiously for 5 years, I've seen the "front stage": What meeting-attending owners see. Or, if any bother, what they read in the meeting minutes.

I entirely agree with Cathy that such ownrs know nothing about HOA governance, which relies on the HOA's governing documents and state statutes.

It really only takes one or two directors, imo, including a knowledgeable, calm, president or "influencer" to foster and build an effective productive Board. If I had my way, every year the Board would meet with their HOA attorney or Prop. mgr. team of some sort for at least a 1/2 day seminar which would include a lot about Board meetings.

I want to add that our 3rd most effective president in 20+ years was a 2--year marine sergeant and then a 20-year police sergeant in a local community. While he didn't learn a lot about the docs & state statute, he was an excellent fiir and calm presider and he took the advice from a couple of us experienced directors. I'd say delegation -- with the BoArd agreeing-- was his other strength.

Totally off-topic:

That is what we were taught in school. However, I've decided that this is illogical. To me, it matters whether the punctuation is attached to the part inside the quotation marks or if it's attached to the entire sentence.

Assuming we're dealing with a quotation that's contained in but doesn't make up the entirety of a sentence, if the punctuation belongs to the quoted part, then it should go inside the quotes. If it belongs to the entire sentence, it should go outside. That's how it should be and that's how I do it.

I'm not sure if this is an example of being a rule-breaker as described in the Forbes article Sheila shared with us. But I'm going with that...

(Why yes, I did spend years writing computer code! How can you tell? A misplaced comma can completely change how a program works, as I discovered when trying to figure out why a program worked perfectly in debug mode but produced the wrong result otherwise.)

(I'm also still salty about losing the double spaces at the end of each sentence when we moved from manual typesetting to computer-generated type. So I put them in even though they mostly get stripped out. Because I'm such a little rebel...)

My errors above: a former president in my HOA had been a US Marine sergent for 20 years, not 2. Along with my year of Board service, I attended monthly board meeting for 5 years, missing only maybe 5. He'd be maybe a tie with our 4th best a 20-ydear Air Foce member, then re'd some kind of masters degree in Organizational Studies, and 20 year with a national Ins. Co. training an humans resources dept.

We've had 7 certified full-time onsite community managers over 18 years. Two of them have been very good at "training" directors even correcting them at open meetings, when they didn't comply with the open meeting Act here. The last three, tho' since about 2017, have been weaker and our current one--our 8th- isn't even certified.

Point is an experienced and knowledgeable PM cn very much help a Board get organized, competent, etc.

Illogical to me, too, Cathy. And I placed them outside quotes for years in early adulthood. But inside is what we see daily in news stories, books, "scholarly works," etc., etc., in the USA. There was a period in my work life when I read a lot of British things where periods & commas are outside quote marks.

Fun to see that you are indeed a rulebreaker!

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Thank you. This is what I am aiming for - that the other board members wise up. First step - access to finances and board approval of invoices.

Our community has some very opinionated vocals - they are there every meeting putting their two cents in. Which is fine. But it can get disruptive & cause the meetings to be sidetracked. To overcome this, we open the meetings & the very first thing we do is allow any owner to have to 2-minute say. After that we do old business, then new business. Most of the time a Board Member will deal with the owners' comments should they fall under a business topic that is listed on the agenda. If it's not listed, then I usually ask them to stay afterwards, or make an appointment to discuss the issue. These actions have made the Board Meetings run much smoother. than they used to.

Good luck with your community.

Nice contribution by Renee. Our Bord does something similar at our required open Board meetings.

There also is handout on the back of the agenda about Owner Conduct during board meetings and our Cali-required open forum ( Our Board provides two). The handout was crafted and approved by the Board a few years ago when a gaggle of three constantly buzzed among themselves during open Board meetings. I'veposted it before and will again if any requests.