I could not live in a HOA.
Hell, I don’t even want to live in a suburb; too many damn city ordinances for me.
I love the rural life. No city, no neighbors, and no “community.”
Note post #37. Warn them that if they file a lawsuit and lose, the HOA will sue for the legal fees and take it out of their homes if necessary.
Do you still have pigeon eggs?
That would be Saim Sam.
Things are going remarkable well.
As I said, Don asked me on Sunday to be on his team. After several back and forths we have yet to schedule a pre-meeting between us, the purpose of which is to decide on our strategy for the pre-meeting with the White Knights who are going to be mediating between the two sides.
I’ve got some conditions which Don will need to agree with in order to join his team. In turn, there’s some conditions in which the mediators will need to accept before we agree to meet with them, and then if they agree, I have some pre-conditions for the other side. That’s before we even begin the negotiations.
Did I mention that if no agreement is met by June 21st, we get new elections, which is my goal?
Assuming Don and I meet next week, it takes at least a week to schedule a meeting with the Mediating Team and several more days for them to decide if they accept, and then another week before the other side can actually agree to the preconditions, it should leave only a couple of days to attempt to negotiate an incredibly difficult disagreement.
One precondition for the mediating team is that they have to ensure that the elections will take place next month if an agreement isn’t reached. As I said, a precondition for the other side is that they respect the vote taken , also the treasurer needs to agree to drop his threatened lawsuit, and they agree to mediation for all further personal disagreements.
We’ll see how it goes.
Don came over for the pre-meeting to get ready for the pre-meeting.
I had to go though all the reason why we need to slow things down, rather than speed them up.
He’ll try to set up lunch with one of the members of the negotiating teem. The guy lives in Taipei and only comes out on the weekend. That’s great news since it limits the number of times that we can meet.
We’ll see if the guy can meet on Sunday for a preliminary meeting with just him, Don and me. If that goes well, we’ll meet with the entire negotiating team the following week, which only allows for one meeting with the enemy camp.
Good gawd. All this for a little HOA in the middle of nowhere.
Cripes, you should be handling the Mideast peace negotiations…
For previous employment, I was in charge of a number of hostile negotiations including one incident where my Japanese import company was suing a US manufacturer for $1,000,000 in damages, all the while we were their exclusive distributor in Japan which we were doing about $1,500,000 per year in sales. That was tricky.
I haven’t ever had any formal training in negotiations, but this book really helped.
One of the best concepts in there is looking at what he calls the “BATNA,” the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, what is your best option if talks fail.
Mr. Crazy is able to get his way because people don’t want to face him directly. Everyone wants him to shut up, but they don’t want to get involved in the fight themselves. I can understand that. He’s willing to sue, and no one wants to go there.
By making a precondition that all parties must agree to not take legal action, it removes one of his BATNAs.
He intimidates people who don’t want to directly say things or do things. We are switching to secret ballots to remove this tactic. Don will also limit discussion times next meeting and will set the order for comments so that someone can offer a rebuttal after him.
They have used the boycott as a tactic on several meetings and so this is the reason for making that another precondition.
Our BATNA is simple. If talks fail, we get a new committee, which is what we want. As I told Don, we’ve already won. If he don’t agree to the precondition, we don’t talk and the vote in the last general meeting is that there would be a new committee.
If they do agree to not boycott and to respect the vote of the general meeting, we make slow progress, but never finish. We don’t want to come to an agreement with them, because they will never agree to our desires, which include removing them from the committee.
However, we don’t want it to look like we’re playing games, so we keep talking enough to look like there is progress, but there just wasn’t enough time to solve things.
We’ll see.
Curious,
What language and or nationality are most of the people? You mention translators?
Does this cause problems?
I’ve heard of some small towns in the US years ago where the German speakers didnt want to share power with say the Danish speakers or the Norwegians. Of course over time there english speaking children gradually ended up taking over.
Why can’t they be calm and sensible like the real Taiwanese parliament?
Yes, exactly. Here’s a Youtube for people who haven’t seen it in action.
Actually, I need to thank you, it gave me the answer: boxing gloves.
No, a little more seriously, Taiwan just doesn’t have the same length of time living in a democracy. The transition from martial law has happened within the lifetime of all of the owners.
While democracy in the West isn’t perfect, by any means, it has been around for much longer.
I suspect that this is pretty typical here. That a small faction uses intimidation and duplicity to get their way.
The majority of people just shut up and don’t say anything. This is a difference between here and the States, where I think there would be a few more people speaking up, and many more willing to vote the bums out.
I need to find a way which will work in this culture. I’ll work with Don to put together an anonymous survey to ask how people feel. Do they want lots of rules or not?
Grrrrr. This shouldn’t be this hard.
We had a general meeting tonight.
The self-appointed White Knight was unable to resolve the problem, as expected so we had a general meeting.
The White Knight attempted to chair the meeting instead of Don, the outgoing Chair. It wound up in a screaming match, between me and White Knight. He had prepared a powerpoint presentation and was going to suggest a ton of rules which would have made the Crazies happy forever.
In the end, White Knight, the Crazies and their friends left the meeting. Without them, we changed the rules to how we wanted them, and elected a new committee. I was nominated for office and gave the old “if nominated, I will not run, if elected I will not service.” Despite that I was given the second highest number of votes, so it looks like I’ll be Vice Chair.
One of the rules we voted in severely limited the power of the committee. Now I’m on the committee, maybe we should rethink that and I’ll start proposing all sorts of tickly little rules. . .
Nay, at lease this round is finished.
We anticipate the Crazies will try to appeal the the town government. . .
Damn. It really shouldn’t be this hard. . .
TokyoBayer, thanks for the updates, these kind of threads are so much fun when the OP keeps us up to date (and I’m not the one going through the misery).
My HOA is wonderful. Before buying I sat in on a meeting because I had heard stories like TokyoBayer has been regaling us with. After the formal meeting I asked, if I bought and painted my house bright turquoise, what would happen. The Chair said he and his wife would laugh and point, the Vice Chair said he would put it on Facebook as the crazy new mouse in the bright turquoise house. The worst I have done is painted my door and shutters ancient bronze instead of the nut brown they were before. So far no Facebook threads and I haven’t seen anyone pointing and laughing.