Security Gates

At my former condominium association, drivers frequently broke the security gate. My former condo association also had cameras and always nailed the perps.

Legally this is a board decision. No way would a court ever rule that the board was wrong per se. Why? Because there are a few perfectly reasonable ways to see this. Security is involved. So is money.

Legally and in my extensive layperson's experience with the law on these issues, your sole recourse is to elect directors who will do as you want on this issue.

I think what you mean by security post is the barrier arm that goes up and down after the metal swing gate opens. That is actually a very common configuration.

We have the same situation. Our board (I am president) has debated for several years about leaving the gates open during the day. There are many reasons, besides the fact that the metal gates can be slow to open and many trucks and cars don't wait for the barrier arm to open and go through or they think they can sneak in and the arm comes down on them and breaks. For us, each time it breaks it costs about $500 to have it repaired (although sometimes if nothing is bent we can just put it back up). We have cameras and we do go after people who break the arm, but they can't always be tracked down or refuse to pay. We tried going to small claims court to go after one electrician, but he successfully avoided three process servers and we could not ever get him to court. I would say that we don't recover about a third of the times they hit the gates.

You talk about security from the gates, but realistically they are only traffic control gates. If someone wants to get into your community they can walk in behind a car, climb over a fence or wall, or randomly call someone on the call box and get let it. I would suspect that your community, like ours, is full of vendors every week day. We have lawn services, pool companies, repair vehicles, delivery vehicles and more every day. Many of those companies have codes or key fobs for the gates - so they can get in any time they want. There is not any real "security" in a gated community unless you have a guard, and even then it's not foolproof. If you are relying on security gates for security than you have a false sense of security.

You can ask your board to see how much money they save in the first few months that they leave the gates open. It may be a large cost savings for your community. You can also go to a board meeting and make comments and get other homeowners to expess their opinion also. Most likely the board can do what they want in this case, so your only action might be to run for the board at the next election if you don't like what your board is doing.