New Translation Of By Laws

Caryl,

Don't waste your money on a translation other than with a HOA attorney specialist. Are you saying that you want your entire by-laws translated into common, understandable English? Unless there are items that are written in legal mumble jumble, I would hope that your BOD could understand and interpret most all of it.

Thru all of the posts on interpretation of HOA documents, we have found that it starts at the State level and trickles down to association documents being written by some law student, trying to impress his mommy or new boss, with his command of legaleze language and the end results is confusion on the HOA Board level.

Yes, what exactly do you mean by "translating."

Because most by-laws give the board the ability to interpret the documents.

But if you mean "translating" as in into another language, well, there are tons of translation services available.

Are you talking about the by-laws (which generally direct how the board is elected and similar administrative items), or the deed restrictions, sometimes referred to as the CC&R (conditions, covenants and restrictions), which are what the RESIDENTS have to abide by in order to keep their properties in compliance?

Because it doesn't matter if they are "confusing" or not, it's not the board's responsibility to handhold the residents and make them understand what they are supposed to do or not do according to the contract they agreed to when they purchased their home. The homeowners should have understood the documents before they agreed to follow them.

If individual homeowners can't figure it out, they need to educate themselves however they can.

Certainly the board can hold a "seminar" or "workshop" to help explain or to help answer residents' questions about specific restrictions that may be causing confusion.

But in terms of "rewriting" the restrictions "plain language," I would not take on that as a board for any amount of money. ANY changes to the CC&Rs, including rewording to make them more "understandable," could easily cause problems and would most likely need to be voted on by the membership anyway.

PS:

Do you have a particular example of a passage or two that is causing difficulty? Perhaps you could post it here so we can see just exactly what a problem this may be.

Thanks to all for your responses. I guess you are right about not putting things into easy to understand format. This almost reminds me of a union where shop stewards are needed to interpret the language of the contract to make sure there are no violations. The "seminar" or "workshop" thing is a wonderful idea. I just want what is best for the community.

It's my understanding the board is doing pretty okay with them.

Glen,

Sometimes, we do take it for granted that everyone knows what those dern book of documents contain and mean. Well, we all know that most people don't understand them and basically have never read them. I agree about the by-laws for Dummies (see my above post) Covering the HOA butt with a disclaimer is important. That is why when putting together a handbook for this purpose, great care must be given to it's writting for accurate interpretation but it not that difficult to create one.