“Our HOA is coming unglued,” Dietmar told me. “We no longer have a board. And the HOA members are not interested in coming to meetings.”
A number of HOAs have gone dormant around the Springs over the years. But Canterbury is different.
On his way out the door, the last remaining board member hired Colorado Management Services to collect dues ad infinitum (that's a fancy Greek term, I think, meaning forever and ever).
CMS collects $150 a year from each of Canterbury’s 55 homeowners. CMS uses the cash to pay the association’s taxes and mails notices of meetings that no one in Canterbury attends.
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Quite a nice arrangement for the HOA manager. No board to report to, the assessments keep rolling in, and the HOA goes on in perpetuity. Call it private government by for profit corporation.
3 comments:
Maybe the owners should just opt out, like some folks in Yavapai County, Arizona did when given the chance:
"Unlike many HOAs, though, and completely unlike formal governments, the Verde Village Property Owners Association is an organization in which participation is voluntary. That doesn't mean mean obedience to the rules is voluntary; but payment of the annual dues that go to sustain the HOA, pay for the upkeep of common property and enable the organization to enforce rules is purely a matter of personal choice. And most people are opting out."
via "Disloyal Opposition: Starving the Beast" (February 21, 2008)
"An army of lawyers and professional property managers has more or less seized control of the HOA system. Why? Because doing so creates a fee machine for these professionals... it's straightforward to rig up a scheme whereby HOA specialists maintain a private fiefdom of fee generation. "
-J. Patrick Sutton
"The Fundamental Flaw With HOA's"[sic]
June 23, 2010
via privatopia.blogspot.com/2011/09/fundamental-flaw-with-hoas-real-estate.html
...and sounds quite voidable.
The managing agent is supposed to be just that ... only an agent. If there is no board, then there should not be any agent, either.
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