Saturday, October 11, 2008

Las Vegas Now | I-Team: Ombudsman Talks About HOA Investigation

Las Vegas Now | I-Team: Ombudsman Talks About HOA Investigation: "No other state has an office like Nevada's HOA Ombudsman, which has assisted thousands of homeowners over the past few years. However, it's up to the state's HOA Commission to handle more serious matters.

The I-Team found the commission has picked up the pace in the last year, but still processes a small trickle of cases, each of which takes about two years to be processed."

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No other state? What about Florida? In any event, the verdict seems to be that the Nevada ombudsman office and the state commission haven't made much of a difference.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My sense is the Nevada ombudsman got wind this issue was becoming a nascent criminal matter and quietly referred complaints to the authorities. It's not realistic to expect ombudsmen to deal with criminal matters when they tend to be so overwhelmed with complaints they can barely carry out their duties.

This has been the pattern when states create CID ombudsman offices due to the dysfunction and abuse of HOA governance. California recently opted not to create such an office and even the agency that would have overseen it objected to the idea.

Evan McKenzie said...

The point isn't that ombudsmen should deal with crimes. The point is that there is still no meaningful oversight of CID boards or the various professionals they hire. Just as with the savings and loan industry and now the financial markets, the lack of regulation is a ticking time bomb.

Anonymous said...

And there won't be any meaningful oversight because as you've pointed out since the 1980s, CIDs represent the privatization (read less regulation) of local government.