The simple answer: Nothing gives the Board the right to censor good faith articulation and expressions of opinions (and even facts) that may be opposed to those of the Board of Directors of Poudre Overlook HOA. Nothing.
On August 27, 2019, Patty Flanary, wife of Acting President, Walker Flanary, posted something in the private (and secret) Facebook Group at www.facebook.com/poudreoverlookhoa. You’ll have to click on it and open in a separate window to see the whole thing (cause blogging is hard 😉
This followed emails from Andy Mowery to the other members of the Board, as well as the Petitioners seeking removal of the entire Board on August 27, 2019. Andy was seeking the answer to the question: Where is dissent allowed in this HOA?
The answer didn’t come in a response to the email. The email was summarily ignored by the “majority bloc” of the Board.
The answer came in a terse response from Patty Flanary, who proposes that everyone agreed to her husband’s interpretation of the governing documents when they moved in. It’s actually not true. They moved into the neighborhood in 2014, and their interpretation of the documents is rife with contradictions. Not the least of which is the concept of “consistency”, which is a theme repeated by Walker Flanary, Irve Denenberg, and some other members of the Board in 2018 and 2019.
There is no such concept in the governing documents. In fact, Article IX Section 6 of the CCRs, combined with the Business Judgment Rule that applies to all Board decisions (from a legal perspective) indicates the exact opposite: Board members are NOT required to make the same decision in all cases, and treat one decision as a precedent for all future decisions. In fact, context is required, and ultimately, the Board may choose to reverse a decision in the past with a decision in the future on the very same owner.
This is not to mention the very important topics raised in the blog post “Purpose, Vision, and Values” by Andy Mowery, which advocates the concept that any decisions about how documents are interpreted and how rules are enforced lies with the Owners, and is not the exclusive domain of the Board. The Board answers to the Owners, not the other way around.
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Open in new tab Shortly after sending the email back to Walker, the post was removed from the Facebook Group. Unfortunately, the Internet doesn’t forget, and this is yet more evidence of attempts to both push a point of view without substance, citations, or factual basis – but at the same time, enforce strict censorship on all dissent.
And, that’s the ultimate point: How can an HOA have credibility and integrity when it censors any and all dissent, and attempts to present it’s opinions as though they are conditions of a contract?
The concept that “we’ve all agreed” is hogwash. No such thing has occurred. Everyone got crude copies of governing documents that they, at best, read through without context and/or study. No one really understood them, because, more than a decade later, we still can’t agree on the actual meaning of much of them. It’s open to interpretation, and that, in turn, leads to a need to redefine our Purpose, Vision, and Values before embarking on more ill-advised enforcement by rigid-minded people who think only their opinion counts, or is above the value of anyone else’s.
If Walker or Patty or Irve would care to explain what, precisely, is false or misleading about anything written or stated by Andy Mowery, now is the time to articulate it and present the evidence that supports their claims.
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