One of the reasons I was sooo happy to move out of my condo and into a house was to get shed of the HOA. Whoever had set up the board there was dumb – in a 15 unit association, the board was made up of 5 members, which meant that at any given time, you had to have at least a third of the owners willing to contribute.
When I moved in, the association was “self-managed,” meaning that the board handled everything themselves – hiring, firing, and paying vendors; collecting dues; doing taxes; ensuring compliance with the law, etc. Within a week of moving in, the current board president visited me and made a pitch for me getting on the board. Starry-eyed, I went for it, and then discovered the nightmare:
[ul][li]The previous treasurer hadn’t understood how to do taxes, so every year she’d simply copied the information from the previous year’s taxes onto this year’s return and sent it in, both state and federal. Similarly, she did each year’s budget by simply copying the previous year’s budget and outlay, without actually calculating how much we’d really spent. [/ul][/li]
[ul][li]The current treasurer found the association’s bank to be “inconvenient” for him, so he moved all the association’s bank accounts to his bank, under his name instead of the association’s; when he found that meant that the government thought it was his money and ought to be taxed in his name – rather than fixing the problem – he used association funds to pay his taxes.[/ul][/li]
[ul][li]Getting a quorum was a nightmare; on meetings that required more than the board to show up, we posted signs in advance, we called/emailed, we walked around the week before, and yet on the day of the meeting, we had to go door to door and beg people to show up to the meeting.[/ul][/li]
[ul][li]We couldn’t get enough people to be on the board; only 3 of us were willing to put in the time needed (and note, I work 60-80 hours a week, as did one other willing member; the third guy was retired, and I guarantee you this wasn’t how he’d envisioned his retirement). So we went around trying to get people to be on the board – all of them said they were too busy. I almost smacked the guy who said he couldn’t because he does Bible study two hours a week, so he was too busy to be on board and take care of his civic responsibilities. You really think Jesus wants you to make other people do your obligations so you can sit on your ass with your friends for two hours a week pretending you’re a good person? You really think Jesus thinks that if you happen to do Bible study, say, one hour a week instead of two so that you can fulfill obligations to your community that Jesus is somehow going to think less of you? And you really think that your two hour a week obligation somehow means that you don’t have time? I work 20-40 hours a week more than you, plus have other obligations that take me away, and I found a way to make it work. Ass.[/ul][/li]
[ul][li]When the crazy lady joined the board, the meetings went from 1 hour every two weeks to a month, to four hours at least every two weeks, because she’d have some nutty idea about what the HOA should be doing, and we’d hear her out and then vote her down (i.e., she wanted us to go around and tell homeowners who had pro-Democratic candidate signs in their windows that they weren’t permitted to have political signs [even though she had a pro-Republican candidate sign in hers], and we’d explain the First Amendment to her, and I’d show her the statute that says we can’t do that, and she’d say okay). But after we’d vote her down, she’d call another meeting and put that same fucking item on the agenda, so we’d again hear her out, then vote her down, then she’d call another meeting, wash, rinse, repeat.[/ul][/li]
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I hate HOAs with a passion. I’m so glad to be out.
