Our kids moved out. We lived in a former display home by a main street, and we took great care of our lawn and landscaping, which was time-consuming. My wife wanted to move to a nicer neighborhood nearby. Our agent showed us a spec-built villa on a wooded lot. I loved the lot, the great room, yard work by the homeowners’ association, the central location, the attractive three-street neighborhood, and the brick mailboxes.
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Eighteen years later, we still love our home, but that yard work brought complications.
First, the developer piled up a maintenance line-item for the association that topped $157,000 before we interviewed a lawyer. But then the developer went bankrupt and gave up trying to take that money from our then-61 households.
Six years later, a second developer started completing our neighborhood, and a few board members seized that opportunity. The new homeowners added more money, so the new board members decided then to fulfill a promise in the covenants to maintain roofing. We disagreed. Homeowners should keep fulfilling the promise of low assessments, not disproportionately take from new neighbors. But the developers’ covenants made the boards powerful, so we couldn’t stop this. There had been roughly 10 years of not saving toward roofing, so the owners of the homes built by the first developer received windfalls of roughly $7,500 per home, paid for by the remaining owners.
We found erosion and took a landscaper’s advice to route our gutter downspouts underground to French drains. Board members secretly paid to do this same thing for other homeowners, and afterward told gutter cleaners to clean the other homeowners’ underground lines but not ours.
Board members paid to aerate everybody’s pond. Subsequent board members stopped paying.
A tree on the common ground that was leaning toward our home hollowed out, and finally in zero wind fell onto our roof. Board members first tried not to pay to remove it, but then relented. Even so, now they’re not repairing the resulting roof, gutter, and siding damage.
Our Missouri state and St. Peters city experts both tell residents to replace honeysuckle to prevent erosion, but past board members had told homeowners not to. Current board members still aren’t addressing honeysuckle. Now they’re instead remediating some homeowners’ erosion by using heavy equipment to bring in rocks.
Last summer, a rewrite committee called a homeowners meeting to push us to approve new covenants that would keep all the current restrictions on homeowners and add more.
I spoke up that we had never agreed to the covenants themselves; we had just bought the home we wanted. When we were later asked to agree to new covenants as a standalone contract, with all the same restrictions on homeowners and all the same powerful boards, for us, that was an easy no.
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Another committee member stood up to criticize me for never having worked on the board or committee. The committee’s presenter backhandedly said no, Jim did do something: He sent a proposed association constitution to members, and it went nowhere.
That little exchange didn’t work for them; my comment helped defeat that rewrite.
Earlier this year, though, a rewrite committee was back, telling homeowners they were still rewriting. The only sticking point they had left was erosion, which they thought they would meet with homeowners about. They ended up meeting only secretly with a small group.
The current board then pushed their next set of new covenants on homeowners in April, then May, then June.
All of the complications above were fostered by our Missouri state lawmakers. Their nonprofit corporation law requires associations to have boards of at least three directors, requires boards to appoint executives who may be directors, and doesn’t require associations to have judicial functions.
Given this picture and supporting discussion, I canvassed our now-complete 125 households and reached people in 65 percent of the households. I took a simple survey about the official covenants and a possible new governance framework, and the survey was answered in 34 percent of households. Meeting to discuss a new governance framework was supported in 30 percent of households.
I want our documents to be modeled on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the U.S. Code, and executive orders, so I wrote my drafts accordingly.
I added a software standard and a standard for handling maintenance requests. I estimated rebates and repayments for roofing, to make everybody whole. I gave an example of a table of homeowner reviews of contractors, to help homeowners arrange work themselves. I added background notes on how to make governance simple and keep it simple, and excerpts of state statues and the city code.
This year, the official rewrites were approved. Still, I started meeting with homeowners to discuss what governance framework most of us will agree will work better for us. Also, even under our current governance documents, any board majority could voluntarily follow almost all of my proposed governance changes.
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I’m developing options. Options are what make freedom work best.
Image: tomaszmichalkania via Pixabay, Pixabay License.