vs. the HOA 2: drafting

[kirinn]

So I corresponded with someone I found on our neighborhood's online forum who'd had an issue with HOA rules-lawyering before. Unfortunately their experience was not encouraging. They said the actual board showed a tendency to want to defer to the management consultant, who encouraged them to be inflexible with the letter of the guidelines. Ugh

Comments

Re: Talk to her!

[kirinn]

Took me a while to reply to this because I'm trying to compartmentalize spending thought cycles on this whole issue because I kind of hate it.

Anyway, the main reason I'm reluctant to go to the management lady first is that the one person I've talked to who has interacted with her before gave me the very strong impression that she's totally inflexible in the face of fairly common-sense requests. Apparently she also declared that there was no such thing as appeal or variance on the guidelines as written, despite the fact that there is a clear section of the printed covenants giving the board the power to issue variances. Yes, this is second-hand, but I certainly didn't get the impression it was being made up.

I also have a (perhaps irrational) fear that if I go to her first and she gets the idea I'm planning to appeal to the board, she may preemptively tell them to ignore me. I dunno if that would actually make any difference. But I feel like just mailing them my argument first thing would at least get some of them to read it, which might give me an in if any of them happened to agree. I dunno. I could send it to everyone at once.

The thing is, while I'm willing to make plenty of tangential accommodations, I'm really *not* willing to compromise on the core issue of applying herbicides to kill half my lawn. I fear her response is going to be "you have to, the end", so I don't even want to start the argument there.

And then the option of going and talking to people face to face... in some ways tempting, in others terrifying. A nice old guy two doors down from me is on the board. On the one hand, it'd be great to have a friendly discussion about it. On the other, if it *does* turn into an argument, I'd want it to be sort of venue-separated, where we can all still be nice friendly neighbors when we're *not* discussing the covenants.

Blargh.

Re: Talk to her!

[akiko]

What they want by the end of this month is a plan. So you draft plan that includes the flagstone path on the left of the house, making the mulch pit under the cherry tree bigger & planting groundcovers like phlox there, a rain garden (do you think next to the neighbors' mulch pit is a good spot?), and the evidence that clover is good and broad-spectrum herbicides are bad, plus that we're on a single income now and don't really have money for it and they can kiss our asses if they want us to take out a loan to do it. (Except more nicely, of course.)