The Poudre Overlook HOA Board has scheduled another Special Board Meeting at 3pm on a Wednesday at a local coffee shop with inadequate notice leading to homeowner apathy. An ACC Meeting (which is literally just the same Board members) is scheduled on it’s heels, which means you’d be sitting there waiting for the next meeting with other patrons, while the Board attempts to meet in Executive Session in a public setting. Awkward and weird.
The scheduling is prejudicial to those who work or having children, and the setting (a local coffee shop) makes it hard for people to hear one another (an explicit requirement under the governing documents and Colorado state law).
Only those curious enough to visit the calendar page of the Frontsteps website daily are given a clue when such meetings are posted – and the Board knows no one is regularly visiting the site (except me). the scheduling is deliberate to keep participation low to non-existent. You literally have to refresh the page daily to catch their 2-day notices because they refuse to email notices, and lately, haven’t even posted the sandwich board at the end of the subdivision.
The last meeting was on 3/11/24, so we are seeing two Special Board Meetings in less than 30 days without any posting of any Regular Board Meetings – even into the coming months. It is clear that the schedule of having meetings every other month, adopted in 2023, has been abandoned in 2024. Instead of putting dates in your digital calendar weeks or months in advance (with reminders set so you don’t miss them), you have to manually go to a website and refresh a page literally every day to find out if you need to rearrange your schedule.
Now, having a meeting at 3pm on a Wednesday doesn’t just inconvenience those who are working regular 9-5 jobs, but it also interferes with those who have childcare duties. It’s just after school, when there may be activities, and it is certainly not the best time to find a babysitter. It appears our Board is deliberately scheduling meetings so that only those who are retired or childless in our community may attend.
And, this is not to mention that the Board is still preventing remote access via electronic means (cell phone, Zoom, or otherwise).
Why is there a rushed meeting?
Well, the open-meeting agenda only includes two Landscape Committee items – for applying herbicide for noxious weeds, and scheduling an event on May 4. But, even after the “dog incident” is supposedly fully resolved, we once again see that the Board is using Executive Session to hide something from owners.
What could it be?
Well, we know that the USPS Certified Mail that President Ballweber demanded be sent to perform a simple Document Request was received on 3/29/24 (with the other, second one, still waiting since 3/30/24). Since non-performance on a Document Request could lead to statutory penalties which a party would have to go to court to receive is possible, I guess that could be interpreted as some sort of legal threat (which this Board loves to complain, again in their 1/2/24 testimony, they are under constant threat).
The problem with that description is that the Board could extinguish the threat with a simple action – respond to a Document Request by PRODUCING THE DOCUMENTS as required by CCIOA.
Instead, a near-secret meeting is quietly posted on the HOA website with no other forms of notice, and then the issue is discussed in secret (how this is done at a coffee shop is yet to be seen). The same Board likes to claim “we have nothing to hide”, yet operates in this manner as a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
The other possibilities are that there is some clean-up work on the dog incident (final signing of a settlement agreement, etc), the liability issues regarding the ongoing neglect of our stormwater drainage facilities, or a brand new legal issue. Secrecy breeds suspicion, particularly with a Board that has a history of unwarranted secrets we find out about much later.
Either way, the POHOA Board needs to start taking responsibility for low-attendance given its notice practices combined with preventing remote access. If all meetings are now to be Daytime SOPs, there will be very few participants indeed.
If you wish to have electronic remote access, you should request it in writing soon. Hopefully President Ballweber doesn’t require that request to be sent via USPS Certified Mail – as they don’t check their PO Box that frequently (as evidenced above).