Can BOD decline to respond to request by delinquent owner?

I'm a condo association board member in Illinois. One of the unit owners has requested a letter from the association confirming the current monthly assessment amount for her unit.

This unit owner owes over $2000 in monthly assessments. The association's attorney has already sent a notice & demand for payment; this was nearly two months ago and no payment has been made on this debt. I should add that the unit owner's mortgage lender has begun foreclosure proceedings and the unit has been up for short sale for at least a year.

Would the Board be within its rights to notify the owner that the assessment confirmation letter will only be issued when payment of the debt is received? We will check with the attorney, but I'd appreciate any insight you may have. Thanks!

Just to clarify, she is not asking how much she owes. She has the demand letter from the attorney regarding the amount of the debt.

She is requesting a letter confirming the amount of the monthly assessment, to provided to a third party in the sale or foreclosure of her unit.

No pettiness here--just the hope that we may actually have a way to collect the debt.

Nancy,

IMO, this is not a "petty" request. If you check your CCRs you may find that a member has a right to ask for such a statement. My CCRs and also AZ law require such a statement to be mailed to the member upon receipt of a written request. The AZ statute requires the statement be furnished w/i 15 days after receipt of the request. The law also states that if the request comes from an escrow agent and the HOA does not respond w/i the 15 days then any lien for any unpaid assessment then due is extinquished.

If you don't give her a statement of what she owes, you wont get paid. Why would you not want to let her know how much she owes to date? I dont get it.

Suresh,

Gotcha! Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Frankly I don't know what the problem is with the BOD. It's no skin off their nose, so to speak, to send the letter. Some BODs just like to exert their authority and, in doing so, resort to acting liking idiots!

And the request was not for a statement. Statement requests are covered on our governing docs; she is looking for a different document and noidiotsus on the board have any experience in this capacity. I guess that does make us idiots in this world :-)

Thanks again.

Some states like Florida which just past a sweeping change can refuse a mmeber useage of everything but to dent a statement is a bit foolish. Send it return reciept requested and send the reply to your legal team for foreclosure what are you waiting for the building to fall down....you are in charge of a business

Well, again, the request was not for a statement. And no, we haven't exactly been waiting for the building to fall down. We only discovered the delinquency at the end of May, when the developer provided the individual account ledgers. Our attorney sent the notice and demand the following week, because we knew the unit was in foreclosure and we wanted to get the debt into collection immediately.

The owner was given 35 days to make payment, and that period is due to expire in a few days. (Though she has already made it clear on a couple of occasions that she has no intention whatsoever of paying the debt.) At that point our attorney will proceed to file a forcible entry and detainer action (not that anyone expects it to do any good, since the property is already in foreclosure). If necessary we will go to small claims court and a debt collection agency. And if there is any other means of collecting this debt, we will do that as well. We are well aware of our fiduciary duty to collect delinquent assessments and take it very seriously. And yes, we all know there's virtually no chance that the debt will not be satisfied in foreclosure.

Unfortunately, I don't know how the association will pay for any of these collection measures. At the moment, 60% of the unit owners are not paying their assessments and we will have to begin collection proceedings against all of them. Our attorney bills the delinquent owners for the legal fees, but if they don't pay the bill then comes to the association.

We've already trimmed costs as much as we can for now, and the treasurer is working on a realistic budget so we can determine how much assessments would have to be increased to cover the basic expenses. If we can't get more than the 15% increase our governing documents allow without a membership vote, the increase will be insufficient even to cover just the utilities and insurance.

In short . . . what a mess.