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March 20, 2008
Legislatures like to impose responsibility while ducking same
Florida, Arizona and Connecticut are all looking at some form of oversight of community associations involving state appointed commissions or something. In Florida, Rep. Julio Robaina, R- Miami, worked hard holding hearings all over the state to make sure everyone who ever got a violation letter or was behind in their assessments got to blast their boards.
As has been the case, they made sure that little mention was made of the fact that the people with issues represented less than a miniscule percentage of of owners, or that problems like embezzlement of association funds, while dastardly, happened in a dozen associations nationally, out of 270,000, or that many of the people testifying before them created their own problem by ignoring the rules that they had agreed to in the first place.
There's an easy way to solve this - first pay the board members $50,000-100,000 for their part-time efforts; then let's give each board member a staff of 4 or 5 people (paid for by the owners) to help them out and ignore it if a few of them happen to be realtives; exempt them from accepting bribes from vendors who get contracts from the association (call it "campaign contributions"); and while you're at it, exempt them from any potential liability that might result from their action or inaction. I mean, if its good enough for the people elected to state legislatures, it ought to be good enough for the people on community association boards, since both are freely elected.
In Arizona, a columnist for the East Valley Tribune has been on a jihad against associations for the past few weeks, looking up everyone claiming that "property rights" or "constitutional rights" are being violated by HOA's. Someone must have told this writer that he couldn't paint his house purple or sent him a violation notice for some weeds. With him, its all too obviously personal, so the subscribers of this paper can expect to read nothing positive about HOA's for the coming future. This is pretty typical in AZ. Make sure everything being built is part of an HOA, then ignore the way the developers build it, then when the owners move in, change all the laws.
It's crazy season, with legislators looking to make their marks before the November elections, so we can expect more of the same. In the end, it will cost all of the owners in community associations a little more to live there; there will be fewer people who want to serve on the board and deal with more bureaucracy, and the professionals, the managers and attorneys whom the ranters love to hate, will be a little bit richer helping deal with the new restrictions, laws and legislators.
Posted by joewest at March 20, 2008 10:56 AM
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