El Presidente is a Good German

I'm ratcheting up my I-hate-you-all rhetoric in an effort to bully the other two board members off, so I can pack it with my anarchic sympathizers prior to the February election. Seems easier that way.

This latest was kicked off by a reiteration of my "end the lawn lottery" position, and how El Presidente doesn't seem to do anything other than respond to events and does not actually lead anything.

(If you don't know what a Good German is, read that link and the related articles to get a primer on modern theories of evil (which is naturally applicable to HOA's).)

On 10/12/07, El Presidente wrote:

> First off: The lawn violations issues that are most important to me.

This is a supreme waste of the powers inherent in controlling a $100k/year organization, in my humble opinion. There are far more interesting things the HOA Board could be pursuing.

> I also happen to get those letters just like everyone else. I follow the deed restrictions[...] I pay my fine if applicaple, just like every one else should.

This is what they call being a "good German" (albeit on a micro scale.)

> If you don't want the lawns to be an issue, then the deed restrictions need to be changed.

The deed restrictions are perfectly fine -- they are intended to keep people from having the Amazon rainforest in their front yard. They're not there to generate a revenue stream for the HOA or Alliance, which is how they're being used today.

> You cannot arbitrairly stop citations, just because you feel they are not nessecary.

I believe we can depend on actual residents and members of the organization to bring real violations to the board's attention. I trust the members to keep an eye on their economic and aesthetic interests. I trust Jennifer to keep an eye on Alliance's financial interests.

> She is following the deed restrictions that we have set in place.

With essentially no oversight in virtually all cases, yes, that's true.

> Secondly: I submit issues that are sent to my by Alliance between meetings.

You also, as president, set the agenda for the board. You have decided that four meetings a year is sufficient to get things done, which is amazingly negligent for a $100k+/year organization. You decided, overtly and through inaction, to hand over day-to-day operations to Alliance. You appear to be against open discussion, as you seem to prefer secret balloting on board issues (for reasons I don't understand), nor do you participate on the public mailing list.

Basically, El Presidente, I feel that you are a bystander on this board. You do not show the leadership demanded of the position of president, and merely react to events generated by either Alliance, the occasional homeowner, or me.

And yes, that last part is pretty harsh, and you may take it as a personal attack. I don't dislike you personally -- I don't really know you well enough to have an opinion about you. From what I've seen of you in your role as board president of a $100k/year non-profit, I'm not happy with your performance. FWIW, I haven't yet met an HOA board president who measured up, so try not to take it personally.

Since we last left our hero....

Sorry for the lack of updates, but really, they're all quite boring. First and foremost, the Case of the Chocolate House remains resolved. El Presidente, in a near panic, called an "emergency" meeting of the board to further the issue. Turns out, Mr. Applesauce got kind of pissed that his color was denied, while Mr. Chocolate gets no comeuppance. He called the management company and proclaimed that the ACC denied him because he's Mexican.

Hilarious, I know.

So, I went to this meeting, rehashed my color theory on the ACC. Not-the-treasurer wasn't liking this theory at all. I brought color samples from the hardware store of all the popular exterior paints, and argued that they're all sufficiently compatible. She wasn't buying that either. I suggested that the architectural control board then choose a set of colors to enforce, or back the hell off. She kind of liked the choosing from a list idea.

El Presidente's inspiring leadership through silence drove me to then reveal my Grand Plan for enforcing deed restrictions. I got them to agree that the deed restrictions were not in place to act as convenient weapons that neighbors can use to bludgeon each other with. They're there to prevent me from building a 1:2 scale replica of Godzilla breathing fire in my front lawn, or from painting my house in a swastika motif.

They bought that, so I dove into my propsal: The HOA should act to enforce covenants if and only if we get a petition from at least 5% of the households that such an enforcement is necessary to preserve property values and/or neighborhood quality. If some individual homeowner, like Mr. Applesauce, felt there was a covenant violation, they can pursue it in court on their own, since according to the deed restrictions, they all may be enforced by "any member."

Amazingly, they bought this too, and so I adjourned myself out of the meeting after El Presidente wrote it down to send off to the management company to send to Mr. Applesauce.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. It would be basically impossible to get 31 homeowners (out of our 630 homes) to sign off on anything but the grossest of violations, and it's these massive violations that actually may decrease home values.

So, that was that. Mr. Applesauce is still pissed, but I've talked him off the racist ledge, and told him the truth -- when he applied, it was a very different board controlling things. Now that there's an anarchist on the board, it'll be a lot harder to get the board to pursue legal action.

Oh, and I moved again to lower assessments to $40/quarter. 2-to-1 against.

On to other issues I've toyed with over the last couple weeks:

The Lawn Lottery

So, in order to keep you abreast, here are the other issues that have popped up since then, over the last couple weeks.

Once a week, the management company representative drives through the neighborhood to note the street addresses of ugly lawns. I have no idea what criteria she uses to gauge offense, but she has admitted that her reports account for about 80% of the total lawn violation reports. Citing the new "five percent rule," I moved that we get the management company to knock this off.

El Presidente and Not-the-Treasurer disagree. They appear to want to enforce a 5% rule only sometimes, or maybe just this one time. Rather than trying to parse the logic, here's the quote from El Presidente:

I do not wish to stop the drive by's because there are a lot of people in the neighborhood who do not like to call to complain because they feel like they are "ratting" on their neighbors, but still want something done about the situation in a non-confrontational manner.

I thought I just convinced them that this is not the kind of thing the HoA should be involved in....

Lawn Lottery: Tested

Someone complained this week that the violation reports on his lawn are insane. He mowed on the 18th, and got a violation dated the 20th. He wants the board to waive the fine. I responded as you'd expect. It's been three days, not a peep out of the rest of the board. I should follow up on that, and reiterate my position against the lawn lottery.

My fame grows...

Apparently, this blog is being read by clutch of Internet people who hate HOAs as much as I do. This is the kind of issue that attracts a lot of kvetching, so it's to be expected. Here's a link that got sent to me today (which reminded me to post on my own damn blog): http://www.thehoaprimer.org/. It's a fine primer, though a little heavy on the hyperbole. But who isn't? :)

I suppose I could publish an e-mail address to attract more correspondence, but really, blogger.com has a perfectly wonderful commenting system. If you want to talk to or about me, do it there. The comments aren't moderated (except for spam of course).

Casa Chocolate -- resolved!

Dang, these people are so easy to push around.

Just about 24 hours after I submitted my analysis, this popped up from El Presidente:

After extensively reviewing the deed restrictions concerning housing color, there is no restriction on painting a house. Only that stairs, chimneys, gutters, and likewise attachments must be painted the same color as the house, or an approved color by the ACC.

This was sent to the board, the chair of the Architectural Control Committee (with a correct e-mail address this time, which apparently was a state secret until now), and strangely, the applesauce lady, but /not/ the owner of the chocolate house.

This of course undercuts the ACC's authority on basically anything, as this issue can be generalized to, "If mom (ACC) says no, go ask dad (HOA Board)," but without that pesky appeals process.

Since my goal is to destroy the HOA, this is a delightful outcome. I do wish there was more fighting, though. That would drive out the other board members faster.

BTW, who paints their chimneys? I have no idea where that caveat came from.

Casa Chocolate

About a week ago, I recieved word that there was a homeowner in the neighborhood who dared to paint his house without approval from our Architectural Control Committee (the ACC). This is usually the most feared and loathed committee of any HOAs -- they're basically the people that tell you you can't have pink flamingos on your yard, nor can you contruct a 1:2 scale model of Godzilla. Fascists.

Anyway, as the story goes, there was a homeowner who wanted to paint her house "applesauce," whatever color that is. The ACC ixnayed that idea. This was two years ago.

Today, this same scorned homeowner noticed that someone in our neighborhood had painted his house "chocolate," whatever color that is. She was peeved enough to report it in, complaining about her own rejection for what she felt was a much more delicious color.

The chocolate homeowner, naturally, is unresponsive to requests from the ACC to maybe go ahead and repaint his house something acceptable.

So now it's to the board. The choices presented to me are:

a) Continue sending letters, or
b) Get the attorney involved.

Since neither option seems very likely to fix things, I think we should just let the original complaintant paint her house whatever color or foodstuff she wants. I've seen the chocolate house, and though I knew the address, it took several seconds for me to pick out the offender. So the color itself, I think, is no big deal.

But of course, there's a larger issue here. Who is the ACC to say what color anyone's house is?

Turns out, they can't -- at least, not according to anything I could find. Here's an excerpt from what I send to the rest of the board:

I've reviewed all the documents I could find that I'd expect paint colors to be discussed (those are cited at the end of this message). Surprisingly, I don't really see any authority for the ACC spelled out regarding painting one's home. I do find plenty of references to "construction," but I'm unconvinced that exterior paint would be considered by a normal person as a "constuction" activity, nor is the term "construction" defined in the Declaration to include exterior (or interor) paint.

Dictionary.com's definition seems to agree -- painting may not be considered an element of construction.

So that's my take. You can paint the front of your house with a mural depicting the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, if you want. You can't construct a replica of said patriotic scene on your roof for Memorial day without consulting the ACC. One involves driving screws and nails. One involves paint. One is construction, the other is not.

It's been at least seven hours since I wrote this opinion back to the rest of the board, and the ACC chair. The Chair's e-mail bounced, so she's out of the loop. The board has remained silent. I assume they are pondering this to a point of understandingness.

The simple solution, of course, is to let the applesauce lady paint her house. The whole problem goes away, then. Of course, it completely destroys any shred of credibility the ACC may have had, but it's a small price to pay for neighborhood placidity.

The complicated solution, on the other hand, is to try it in court. Let a judge decide if the HOA deserves an injunction to force the homeowner to repaint his house. Judges are, in general, a fairly sober bunch, and when you point out that such-and-such isn't in a contract, they tend to rest on that. But what do I know, I'm not an attorney.

Now I have a Parks Committee, ho ho ho

I went to my first board meeting. It was pretty much as I expected -- every significant decision was deferred to the management company representative, nobody knows how to perform a RFP (request for proposals), and nobody seems to mind that there is no Treasurer.

I kept quiet most of the time -- I figure it'd be polite to mostly just sit on one meeting before I start bullying the existing board members around for serious.

I also noticed there was only the board and the management company present -- in other words, no committee people. Apparently, a) the committee people were invited and b) they were supposed to give a status on their individual projects (the committees do all the budgeting for the park, maintenance, publicity, etc.), and c) never actually have ever given a report beyond the initial budget requests, and d) never actually invited.

So, yes, pretty much as disorganized as expected.

I did vote to lower assessments from $43.28 or some equally impossible to remember figure to a flat $40/quarter. My proposal was based on the 20% or so delinquency rate on homeowner assessment payments -- maybe if it was a flat $40, people could remember it better -- but sadly, I was voted down 2 to 1.

Oh, it also was revealed that while we have a budget for a Parks committee, no one is actually on that committee (this kicked off a ten minute confusifest about what happens to budgeted monies that aren't spent).

So, as my first official act, I installed my wife in the position of Park Committee Chair, in a cunning-not-really move to expand my power base.

In other news, I've asked the other two boardsters over to my house to discuss my rather hateful distrust of the management company, and see what we can do about the massive leakage of money in their direction. Sadly, though, the President of the Board is so busy with her life that she can't carve out an hour until the end of the month.

-Vice-Chancellor HOAEater

Half-a-Car, resolved!

At least, it's gone. Rumor has it, the sheriff towed it.

Sorry for the boring ending to the story.

The Half-a-Car problem

So, there's half a car parked on the sidewalk/lawn in my neighborhood. One of the other directors noticed it, and I guess complained to the management company.

I'm sure the management company is thrilled at this kind of thing; it's big, obvious, and expensive, and implies some recent trajedy they can capitalize on.

There's no resolution yet, but here's some recent e-mail. I asked if anyone has actually spoken to the owner of the car.

Alliance company commented:

HOAEater, in accordance to the Texas Residential Property Owners Protection Act, all of our communication is sent out in writing so that we will have a paper trail concerning the correspondence for fining purposes.

Not-the-Treasurer followed up:

The Board has always let the management company handle communication with property owners simply because there does need to be a paper trail.

I replied:

Right -- reading the Act, though, it doesn't preclude non-written communication. It just requires written communication before enforcement. Specifically, certified mail, return receipt requested (I assume that's what Alliance does). But talking isn't prohibited.

ref: The Ironically-Titled Act

Of course, if the problem is resolved before fines are levied, nobody gets paid, so I guess it depends on what the board's motives are. :)

So we'll see where this goes. Can't wait for Monday's board meeting.

Investigating your HOA is so BORING

So boring, I haven't posted here in a while.

Quick recap: I did get a pile of papers that appears to resemble a General Ledger. As far as I can tell, my HOA is spending about 40% of its money on just general & accounting (G&A) expenses.

In the meantime, two of the four board members resigned, presumably because I kept sniping at them on the mailing list. And now I've been appointed Vice-President of the Board. Thus ends the first chapter of my quest to consume my HOA.

Now I get to deal with all the weird HOA business that the board gets to deal with. For example, yesterday, I was asked to vote for one of two or three courses of action on how to deal with some woman who refused to take down her Christmas lights. I say it was two or three because the options were kind of scattered and rambling and I didn't really understand them, aside from that they all seemed to involve suits and attorneys and associated BS.

So, I took my newfound powers as Board Vice President, and went to the woman's house to check out this eyesore. She happened to come out of the house, so I talked to her a bit, and she said she didn't have a ladder. I told her she could borrow mine. I dropped it off today, reported this back to the board, and they agreed to drop whatever pending action there was going on, much to the disappointment of the attorneys, I'm sure.

Seemed a lot cheaper than lawsuits.

I can't wait to get the docket of all the pending actions to see if they're all as easily solved.

Next up: Someone has 3/4s of a car parked on the sidewalk in front of their house, for some reason.

Yay, I got the General Ledger... well, not really

Today, my HOA's management company handed over the General Ledger for the last three fiscal years (2004 through 2006), only 8 days after I asked for it. Great!

...

Hmm, this isn't a General Ledger.

Keep in mind, I'm not an accountant. I've balanced a checkbook maybe three times in my life -- my personal finances are modest enough that I can track them all via my bank's web applications and my head.

That said, what my management company handed over is not a general ledger -- as it is most notably missing any mention of income. What they're calling a GL is really an expense sheet.

Over the course of the last week, I've also been in touch with my HOA Treasurer via e-mail, during the course of which she dropped a bomb shell. After asking some questions about her own access to these financial records, she states, "I am not the Treasurer."

Now, I don't know about you, but when the Treasurer of a $100,000/year organization states she is not the Treasurer... this is kind of alarming.

Second, she indicates that the responsibilities of the HOA finances does not rest with her, but with the entire board. What's also interesting is that the aforementioned entire board has been cc'ed on pretty much everything so far, and has deigned not to comment at all, even when the not-Treasurer has suddenly saddled them all with her lack of fiduciary responsibility.

Anyway, I'm back to the management company to get a copy of a real GL. I'm also now getting curious where our (possibly mythical) reserve fund lives, and finally, my wife has some nice knockers that she's using to lure me away from this blog. And it's working.

On the Droppings of Cryptoanthropological Beasts, and Open Financial Records

It all started last week, when, for reasons unknown, my community's mailing list was suddenly missing the most recent thread from the archives. See, my wife used to be chair of the publicity committee for our HOA, and we're old hands at running Internet e-mail lists (listsrvs, whatever you want to call them). So, she set up a list at Yahoo! Groups for our HOA so we could basically just chat about whatever in the neighborhood. Most of the time, conversations centered around complaints about the HOA not enforcing violations like parking cars in the street, dog walking without a leash, the deplorable state of the community park... pretty standard stuff.

Well, years passed, and my wife gave up the chairmanship. So now some new guy is the chair, and to be a sport, Mrs. HOAeater gave ownership rights to the Yahoo! Group to the new guy.

A few weeks later, we're in the present, and we're having one of our usual conversations, this time about how used condoms and "human feces" were found on about one of the play areas of the park. When asked, "how do you know it was human?" the original poster -- not me -- admitted it may have been a chupacabra. We may never know. The conversation revolves around the poop issue, since poop is funny and gross -- especially chupacabra poop.

There is also a parallel, serious conversation on Who To Complain To, and my wife helpfully posted the e-mail addresses for all the committee chairs and Board members, since few of them are actually subscribed to the list (for some reason).

Suddenly, the thread is gone.

And now nobody can post. And my wife and I (and nobody else), are now in a special "moderated" status -- which means that if anyone could post, we still couldn't unless one of the moderators approves the message.

Well, it turns out, the president of the HOA didn't like the thread, and complained about it to the new publicity committee chair, and mentioned legal action for slander. She also made it clear that the HOA, Inc. "no longer recognizes" the mailing list.

So, the new chair dude freaks out and deletes the thread and shuts off posting.

Now, keep in mind, my wife is still a mailing list owner -- so we can see the logs of all the deletings and status changes and description changes and everything that he's doing on the list.

A few days of sniping through e-mail passes, and today, the mailing list is back in normal operation. However, no real explanation is ever made regarding the bout of censorship. I take the reasons at face value -- the president didn't like the poop talk, she didn't like seeing her e-mail address getting posted in association with poop talk, and whined to the committee chair about it, who overreacted for a while. Whatever.

But then I started thinking about the HOA in general, and how they've never really done anything useful for me. I've reported my share of abandoned cars, and nothing ever happened until I called the sheriff's office. I've noticed the park is a nightmare -- which sucks, because I have kids who are the target age group. And most of all, I've noticed that my home value and the value of my neighbors' homes have all been pretty much sucking. That whole housing bubble burst due to the foreclosures on 5-year ARMs? Yeah, that's my neighborhood.

Iin light of all this, why am I paying $40 a quarter to support this organization that I really would just rather go away? And come to think of it, I do happen to have about 600 houses in my HOA -- so that comes to about $96,000 a year for a bunch of nothing. How wasteful!

In the meantime, I've read and re-read the bylaws of my HOA, trying to figure out how this whole thing works, anyway. Like, if the HOA went away, what would the practical effects be? I suppose no one would be around to maintain the park, or pay the electricity bill, or do the entrance way maintenance work... but is all that worth a hundred grand a year? Does it really even cost that much?

So on April 30, 2007, I bopped down, unannounced, to the offices of the management company (who is Associa/Alliance, by the way), emboldened and empowered by this article of my HOA bylaws:

Article XIV: Books and Records
The books, records, and papers of the Association shall at all times, during reasonable business hours, be subject to inspection by any Member. The Association Restrictions shall be available for inspection by any Member at the principal office of the Association, where copies may be purchased at reasonable cost.

Well, it doesn't quite work out that way in reality. Turns out, the books are kept by the property manager, who works in a different location. No problem, thinks I, I'll just head up there. They do tell me I should call first, but I don't bother -- after all, it's normal business hours. Well, an hour later, I'm at the other office... and what do you know, the actual records are kept at the original location I was at earlier that morning! So it'll be a little while before I can actually see them, since the property manager will have to get her assistant to pull the records.

That's fine by me, of course. So I get near a computer, and dash of a quick e-mail thanking the property manager for her time and ask when I might expect to actually see some of these records? And by the way, if they're in electronic form (and who keeps their books in actual books anymore, anyway?), I'd love to have those instead. Save on the copying charge, too.

It turns out, they are in electronic form. And I can have the monthly income statment reports for the last three years... but for Decemebers only. All the other months, I'll have to wait a couple days (they must have them stored in different computers strewn about the Texas landscape, I guess).

Of course, after seeing these YTD figures for the last three Decembers, I'm now even more interested in how my compulsory assessments are getting spent. But, I'll have to save that for tomorrow.

The morale of today's story is, even if your non-profit HOA is supposed to keep their financials open to members, it may not actually be the case. Luckily for my HOA, I will be storing all the "open" records I get on the Internet so I won't ever lose them again, and maybe other people can just get them from me rather than have to perform this silly dance to get at the goods.

Will I actually find some evidence of criminal embezzlement? Probably not. I honestly just think my HOA is incompetent, and I figure my HOA's management company is (rightfully so) profit-driven. But I intend to fully document the details of this organization, so that I may be better prepared to eventually dissolve or destroy it.

All over some goofball censorship on a discussion about chupacabra poop.

First post / Welcome to HOAeater

This is the HOAeater blog, and its intent is to document the steps I am taking to destroy my own Home Owners Association ("We put the 'moan' in Homeowner!").

My HOA is in suburban Texas, but I can't imagine things are too different in other states. Feel free to offer comments and ideas.

If you're reading this, you'll probably be interested in these other sites:

http://www.texashoareform.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowners_association
http://www.ahrc.com/new/index.php/src/news (California-centric)

I'll start telling my story tomorrow. I may end up moving this over to LiveJournal, haven't really decided yet.