BillD16 (Texas)
Posts: 982
Posts: 982
Posted:
So … I lost the HOA Board election for my neighborhood. I know this will sound like sour grapes, but I mostly felt relieved when the results were announced, and I slept very well that night.
On the other hand, the experience really drove home just how far our neighborhood governance has fallen. I chanced to look at some Annual Meeting Reports from ~2005; they were 40+ pages long and *very* complete and full of details. Thursday’s annual meeting didn’t have a Meeting report. It was a ZOOM meeting run by the PM, who was quick to mute anyone who spoke up with a question. Which included people who were not myself, BTW. The Board was way okay with it, as they had no “hard” questions. I recorded the audio; not sure if it’s good for much. One person spoke up and complained about all of the muting, and how this is supposed to be *our* meeting … I’m going to give them a call.
I don’t want to seem melodramatic, but I really *am* getting the sense that our PMC is purposefully trying to take over every function they can, from running the meetings, to dropping $13K on a video security system that can only be accessed via the PMC with a police report, to controlling gate access at the pool. It’s getting to be that nothing can happen without the PMC being involved.
While I’m here, I want to again thank everyone for the amazing help on those Leasing Regulations! If there was a single significant success this week, it was overturning the Board’s applecart on this topic. I had put together various material on the faults of the shoddy survey they used to “prove” the majority of the neighborhood backed them - but when I tossed out that URL that was obviously the source of ‘our’ new rules (which, BTW may have cost us over $10,000 in legal fees) - I think they kinda freaked out.
(To be honest and fair, *I* have no idea how that URL was found, myself).
But I had fun - maybe a bit too much fun - building short campaign ads with AI. I’m in the process of putting them online (with a tiny bit of anonymization) so in a day or so I’ll post them here, if anyone is curious. I have to warn that many people claimed to have issues with the use of AI in this manner. I think that was largely just an excuse. I suffered through a *LOT* of abuse and defamation, but stuck to the high road and attempted to engage on the issues. In my neighborhood, I discovered, that simply does not work.
Finally: I’m not sure I trust the election results, which the PM simply displayed as a list via the ZOOM meeting. I assure you that I’m not desperately hoping to win due to miscount or discovering fraud - but I have no way of knowing if the vote tally was legit or something the Board President and the PM composed out of pure imagination the day before the meeting. But the results were interesting. There were 2 open places and 5 candidates:
125: “K”, who ran to extend his appointment to the Board. Long time resident, older.
48: “G”, who didn’t attend the meeting and ran solely on his 3 paragraph bio that came with the ballot. New resident, young.
47: “N”, who mostly hid in the shadows. New resident, young.
46: “B”, aka myself. I campaigned pretty hard on FB. Long time resident, older.
45: “D”, (see “G” above).
I’m interpreting this to mean that most people chose the incumbent, and then picked a second person at random. Although it could be that I campaigned too hard and would have done better remaining silent. Or that I lost lots of votes due to all of the defamation.
Anyhow, I hope some of you might find this of interest.
Bill
HOA Board ex-President
Austin, Texas USA
“You can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor”
Austin, Texas USA
“You can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor”