Laws governing HOAs differ wildly from state to state.
In Virginia, the HOA structure most closely resembles a representative republic form of government. The powers accorded to HOAs in many ways closely match those accorded to other forms of government in the Commonwealth.
The biggest challenge facing many HOAs is not an out-of-control board ruling the community as its own personal feifdom, it's getting enough people actually interested in participating in the community to the point where it can function at a practical and a legal level.
That's what has faced my HOA for years. We had a core group of people who did everything. We did have a bookkeeper who took some of the financial pressure off, but running even a small community without employees or major infrastructure was time consuming and extremely frustrating.
Getting enough people to attend the annual meetings was a challenge. That's one day a year. Getting people to volunteer to be on the architectural review, grounds, contracts, and other committees? You'd have more success doing brain surgery on yourself.
The one thing that people could do, would do, did do, and in fact loved to do?
BITCH.
At the top of their lungs, bitch about what a horrible job the board was doing. OK, Mr. XXX, you have some pretty strong opinions on what the board is and isn't doing, how about standing for election or serving on one of the committees?
"WHAT??? I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT! I'M A BUSY MAN!"
Last year's annual meeting was a perfect example. The board was ambushed by several owners who decided that they didn't like the pine trees growing behind their properties, and had been demanding that the board remove healthy pine trees that have been there for decades, which quickly devolved into a general screed about the amount of money the board was allocating on trees and grounds in general. It was extremely ugly.
Several of the biggest whiners were essentially forced to sign up to form a grounds committee that would survey and make recommendations to the board about the grounds. The board gave them a very clear mandate of what it was to do. The chair of the committee was hugely gung-ho, and promised a report to the HOA board by August.
At that point, the committee collapsed. The biggest whiners didn't go to committee meetings, the chair apparently alienated other members. August came and went. We told the chair that in order to allocate money to address major concerns posed by the grounds committee we would have to have the report by December 1, which put a serious crimp in the Board's budget process.
We finally, in FEBRUARY, got a largely unintelligible, 4-page report that met NONE of the mandate that the board had give them at the annual meeting.
It's a good thing that the report was such a complete and total flop, because the board had approved the 2006 budget months before, and there was no way to go back and reallocate funds.
At the annual meeting last month? The people who were most vocal about the trees and the horrible job that the board was doing? Think they could be bothered to come? *expletive deleted*it no.
To anyone who thinks that HOAs are nothing more than communistic organization incarnate, I submit this to you...
The bad HOAs, the ones you hear about, the MINORITY of HOAs that garner the majority of the attention (sounds like bad stories about guns, right?), the ones that are abusive of their power?
They generally all have something very, very important in common...
The board of directors didn't seize power and declare itself to be the ruling junta.
The indolence, ignorance, laziness, and disinterest of the HOA members ALLOWED those boards to turn bad.
