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October 12, 2007
Apathy Rears its Ugly Head at Election Time
I was at a conference a few weeks ago and one of the long time committee members was lamenting about his long time service on the board with no replacement in sight. He was asking around, to try and find out what happens when there is no one to serve.
A week later, I received this email message: "Here we go again - we have three openings on our five person board for 2008 & 2009. We only have three people who are interested in running - apathy is not getting any better."
So what do you do? This is not the first time I have talked about this. In fact, there is an article on my website entitled: "Apathy - The Number One Problem in HOAs??"
So what you do is try several things:
Have an HOA party ... and beg. You may not be able to get neighbors to a meeting, but maybe you can get them out to a "meet your neighbors" party.
Send out a questionnaire to members asking them about their interests, and then go about contacting them one by one to see if they will use their strong "suits" (capabilities or knowledge) to help the Association.
Put a letter together telling the members that there is a crisis in the association and if people are not willing to step up and serve, it is possible the HOA may go into receivership which means a court-appointed "manager-type" of person who will pay the bills and impose assessments as needed (under the authority of the court), but without any personal interest in the HOA itself.
If the HOA is facing a very large assessment, it might actually help bring people out to serve - at the least it will likely bring them out to criticize and provide the opportunity for the board to say: "If you think you can do a better job, we'll resign and appoint you."
It is a difficult place to be, having served for years and not seeing any reasonable opportunity to step down and hand over the mantle to someone else. It is important to understand, however, that quitting without having a successor board could lead to some serious legal liability. It might be better to hire a lawyer to petition the court for a receiver before disaster strikes due to leaving the "ship" without a "captain."
Posted by Beth Grimm at October 12, 2007 10:04 PM