It has been a strange March and April in Poudre Overlook. When we last heard from the Board and the Document Revision Committee in early March, they were still wasting time doing a tap dance saying they could not tell us what the purpose of the Committee was because . . . they were still waiting for the Draft prepared by our HOA Attorneys, VF-Law.
Director Jones intimated that the delay was frustrating to all of them, but could not offer up an explanation for the delays. After all, at the November Annual Homeowner’s Meeting, they had promoted the concept that they could rapidly move through this process in a few months and were ready to hit the ground running. Turns out, it took VF-Law at least 4 months to produce the first draft.
In the interim, as they were searching for reasons and excuses, I raised the point that the attorneys may be busy dealing with issues raised by the HOA Foreclosure Crisis that was exemplified by the investigative journalism into the rash of foreclosures in Green Valley Ranch and The Timbers. As someone working with Legislators and Stakeholders on a proposed bill, HB22-1137, we know that opponents of the bill who are attorneys have been working overtime to explain why their practices, often rooted in revised documents, are justified. Perhaps our HOA attorney is caught up in this – as his firm is one of those involved in the Green Valley Ranch foreclosures.
But, the Board responded that they didn’t intend to put things into our documents to make it easier to foreclose on fines. That’s good, in a sense. But, it opens up the possibility that POHOA is being duped into changing the documents not for the benefit of homeowners, but as a means for attorneys to have immense powers to shut down any homeowner who disagrees with a board, as well as gives any Board, not just the current one, the power to escalate fines into foreclosures (which also profits the attorney). There’s another profit center too: Many in POHOA were unaware that when they hired Trademark Property Management Group, they OK’d by contract the ability for Trademark to collect 50% of the fines that they “find”.
This is an invitation to an endless situation of Hostile Environment Harassment that has permeated and saturated Poudre Overlook since 2016. Once the cycle starts, it is very difficult to put to rest as someone always has an axe to grind – and when the tools of retaliation are readily available and there is no consequence in Colorado HOAs, we should anticipate and expect that someone will eventually use them.
In order to know if this is, in fact, the case, we’d need to see the draft document that we’ve been waiting so long to see. But, apparently, this is a Top Secret matter at Poudre Overlook HOA. And, the lengths and efforts that the Board and Document Revision Committee have gone to keep us from seeing them is now crossing into CCIOA non-compliant actions. Let me illustrate.
On March 6, 2022, the Board sent out an email to the community announcing that “in an effort to reduce emails” they were no longer going to let us know about meetings – we’d have to go to the POHOA website to find out when meetings were occurring.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: Poudre Overlook HOA of Fort Collins <poudreoverlookhoa@gmail.com
Date: Sun, Mar 6, 2022 at 2:34 PM
Subject: POHOA Board Meeting 3/8
To: PoudreOverlookHOA Fort Collins <poudreoverlookhoa@gmail.com>
Hello Neighbors,
Attached is the agenda for the upcoming March 8th Board Meeting. The meeting starts at 5:30pm and the Zoom link can be found within the agenda.
In an effort to decrease the number of emails you receive from us, all future meetings/agendas can be found on the www.Poudreoverlookhoa.com calendar. If you have had any difficulty obtaining access to the website please reach out and we’ll sort it out.
Regards,
Poudre Overlook HOA Board of DirectorsPO Box 101Laporte, CO 80535
Of course, the website we use is hosted by Frontsteps, and the place that Director Jones chooses to put the announcement requires you to log in, and ignore the fact that even though there is a place to put an announcement on that page (which hasn’t been updated since mid-February), you have to to the menu and click on “My Reservations and Requests” in order to see either the Calendar or Community Events. In the world of web design, this is what we call “burying” disclosures.
If you DON’T want someone to find something, but you want to meet some legal criteria, you seek out “technical compliance”. Technically, the announcement is “on the website”, but without any training, how likely is someone going to dig through “My Reservations and Requests” to find an announcement that could more easily be put on THE LANDING PAGE WHEN YOU LOG IN.
If you weren’t allowed to keep the meeting a secret, but you really didn’t want prying eyes there, this is how you would go about things.
But, it gets worse.
I finally noticed that there had been a meeting on Tuesday April 5 the following week (on 4/11). So, I emailed the Board and asked them why they changed notice, and they referred me back to the March 6 email. The problem is, that email is saying they are going to stop sending emails for “all meetings”. They can’t do that.
There are many meetings for which there are quite specific notice requirements, including by USPS Mail. The Annual Meeting is an example. So, it certainly undercuts the concept.
But, there is also a section of CCIOA that requires an HOA Board to give email notice to homeowners who request it. See C.R.S. 38-33.3-308: “if the email communication is available, associations are required to provide email notice of regular and special meetings to all owners who request email notice“
In response, the POHOA Board decided to send out another email on April 13. But, this time, they decided to merge the requirement for sending out an email notice with a . . . survey. This was a 4-question survey for the Document Revision Committee, and if you were clever enough to search your Spam Folder on a daily basis, you might have seen this.
Why did this end up in everyone’s Spam Folder?
Well, Ms. Phillips, of the Document Revision Committee, decided it would be a good idea to create a whole new gmail address for surveys from the committee. So, unaware that sending an 87-person email sent with BCC from a brand-new email address would instantly cause Google (and other platforms) to deem such an email as “spam”, this message essentially went unnoticed.
Of course, I noticed that there was no email for the 4/19 Document Revision Meeting, but when it started, and the only two people besides the Board (which is essentially running this committee) who attended are Walker Flanary and I (the only two people who wished to be on the Committee, but were denied participation), it was painfully obvious that they accomplished their goal of reducing eyes on the process to near-zero.
At the meeting, they kind of discovered their error, and decided they’d have to let everyone know to dig out the survey so they could actually measure some response.
So, that led to yet another email, a newsletter sent on 4/20, letting everyone know that the survey email was in their Spam Folder. And, oh, by the way, there’s some other meetings coming up too. But, you’d have to be interested enough in a “newsletter” to then see the underlying meeting announcement.
Of course, this led to the discovery that the original email on March 6 also had a huge error – instead of using BCC, they copied EVERYONE in the neighborhood (which exposes everyone’s email address). So, I asked if it was OK for me to hit Reply-To-All to let my neighbors know about this Top Secret Endeavor, and whether that violated any rules.
Instead of responding to me, the POHOA Board decided to race to . . . yet ANOTHER email to explain their mistake. But, on top of all the other errors, they told everyone to look for an email from 3/3 (It was sent on 3/6), and that it was about a meeting on 3/7 (It was actually 3/8). And, since we have no actual rule to enforce about any homeowner emailing another homeowner, they decided to “implore” homeowners not to use the email addresses and . . . just delete the notice.
So much for that “effort to reduce emails”.
Meanwhile, they haven now had two meetings, which, by the way, homeowners are NO LONGER ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE. You can log in via Zoom, but you can’t use the chat function, nor can you unmute yourself. You can sit, watch and listen. That’s it.
I have yet to receive a single substantive response to any question in the past 5 months. While I understand that this is part of the retaliation against me, I’m starting to hear rumblings that others in the community share similar concerns. I know others have asked “Why are we doing this document revision?” as well, and no one can get a straight answer.
But, this is what is even worse than all of this: Apparently, at the April 5 Document Revision Committee Meeting, the “committee” VOTED to not release the draft document. It was not unanimous. According to sources wishing to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, the vote included 7 persons (which means that the Board was directly involved), with 3 voting FOR keeping the document secret, 2 voting AGAINST, and 2 abstaining. We don’t get to know who or what was said, nor was this on the agenda or was public comment allowed.
This is not just non-transparent, it is suspect.
Because here is the other thing: It appears now that the secret is even being kept from Committee Members. If those that ARE allowed to see and work on this cannot know, then what, exactly, is going on here. WHY is this such a big secret that we only get to know at the last minute?
And, I suspect that this is just an old legislative trick – keep opposition from knowing what is in the bill until right before the vote so they don’t have time to read, understand, or even participate in the process. In fact, the emphasis on limiting everyone to only 2-minutes of comments is the best evidence that this is exactly the case.
If this is true, and it likely is (because our former HOA Attorney put this in an email to members of this board 2 years ago – that they inadvertently revealed in the CCRD investigation in 2021), it means that this secrecy is a deliberate ploy to get a political advantage. Unfortunately, neither CCIOA or our governing documents gives rights to such secrecy for such purposes.
Right now, the POHOA Board is sitting on 6 different document requests for simple procedural documents that have aged to the point that each one carries up to a $500 penalty. They have taken this game of secrecy so far that they are willing to create expenses for everyone in the community, just to protect themselves politically. This is pure ego, and not putting the needs of the community first. It’s also a failure of fiduciary duty. If the records of the association are inconvenient to your wish to remain in power, you still have to turn them over.
All of this ignores the true Elephant In The Room – Poudre Overlook HOA LOST over 29 thousand dollars in 2021, which was silently slipped onto the website just like the meetings that they don’t want anyone to notice. In 2019, we had a surplus of over 27 thousand, which is a HUGE reversal. And, the 2020 report is missing from the HOA website. Numerous inquiries to the Board for comment on this situation have not received response, just like they don’t want to talk about their minimum compliance issues with CCIOA on meeting notices.
The pattern is set: When this POHOA Board refuses to answer questions, there’s usually a significant problem beneath the surface, or an ill-advised plan in progress that they want to slip into place without most in the community noticing.
Since Director Jones told me to use this blog as a means of communication with the entire community at a recent meeting. I accept the recommendation. But, since there are no actual rules with emailing or sending a USPS letter to my neighbors for political purposes, I’m hereby giving notification to all residents in the community that I will soon be using the emails revealed in the above email from March to invite everyone in the community to see the blog Director Jones wishes me to use to communicate with them – in opposition to their HOA politics.
Since “posting on a website” is sufficient notice for Director Jones and the POHOA Board to alert them to inbound emails, that standard should be the one applies to me equally and consistently.
I will soon be launching a discussion Board on this website as well so that homeowners can have the opportunity to discuss with one another their concerns with our Board, and any of the vendors they hire. Homeowners that have concerns have a right to voice them and be heard – a principle of Robert’s Rules of Order. The way meetings are being given notice and homeowners are constrained, these rights are being infringed. For the time being, those of us who have these concerns have a right to voice them without fear of retaliation – particularly with new powers and authorities that they wish to grant themselves in a secretive document revision process.
If there was any other legitimate purpose, they’ve had months since announcing the decision to tell us what that is. And, if they needed to see a draft from VF-Law first, they’ve had that for several weeks. There’s no more room for excuses. This is clearly a deliberate attempt to change the special contract from underneath homeowners before they get a chance to know what changes are being made, or time to understand them. It’s a very serious matter, and this Board, even if they are operating in good faith, is not defending us from unintended consequences. Those of us who know and see this danger must be let into the stakeholder process. It’s unconscionable that we are not at this juncture.