Are HOA board meetings useless?

Found out one of the community pools is not heated from Oct to March because HOA says it?s not in their budget.  It would cost them $5k a month to heat that pool so they turn it off during half of the year.  Home owners have been asking for guards for a few years but that hasn?t happened.

Does anyone know how these things get escalated beyond the HOA board meetings and if it?s even worth fighting for?  Most likely they?d just increase monthly HOA to get some additional resources?

Is it not a common thing for most of the pool heating to be turned off during winter? It is like this in Woodbury and PS.

One person asking for something isn't going to make it happen, you need lots of homeowners asking the board.  They can't make big changes without majority vote anyway so it really comes down to the number of homeowners that want it done and are willing to pay for it through increased assessments.

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HOA board meetings are useless whenever the board members aren't actually homeowners, as is the case with any new community until buildout. The board members, more often than not, are reps from TIC and the community management company, who aren't personally invested into the community, and therefore are less likely to make any changes to the CC&R/R&R that are requested by the community.

BTB is correct.  The way around this is to run for a board seat yourself, and that way you can push through the agenda that benefits you the most.  This is how it works in the real world.

Gotta run to be on the board to get anything done. Meetings are dull. There's always that one home owner who will show up complaining that their home was painted "Beige" and not "Sand" and gripe about how no one listens to them about these mission critical issues. Once you get past those speed bumps, you can rally enough votes to get things done for the community as a whole. The time investment will be about 2 hours per month. Not a big commitment relatively speaking.

Why not raise dues $2.00 per month, get solar heating for the pool and add a guard patrol? If it's described well to homeowners, most of them will be willing to increase dues as long as there is a visible benefit. Many of the original (and fat) contracts awarded by the builder for HOA maintenance can be revisited to squeeze costs down. Our HOA was able to reduce expenses considerably because the previous HOA management never asked about the higher bills. They simply wrote checks without considering what they were getting for those high fees. Lazy HOA management is sometimes worse than intrusive HOA management.

If you want change, be the agent thereof.

My .02c

SGIP

Soylent Green Is People said:

Lazy HOA management is sometimes worse than intrusive HOA management.

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Sometimes you will have a good HOA board, but they lack certain expertise and hence the contractors take advantage of them.  I've experienced this in the past where the board consisted entirely of older long-time owners who were retired or semi-retired, and they cared for the community a great deal, but they would often times get gouged on bids for work.

Liar, that's usually because the board relies on the mgmt company for referrals for three bids to comply with policy.

JIMHO, the HOA Mgmt side of the house is pretty sleazy with gifts and lack of conflict of interest protections we typically expect for government but are grossly lacking for this quasi-government set up with dependence on commercial entities for guidance.

nosuchreality said:

Liar, that's usually because the board relies on the mgmt company for referrals for three bids to comply with policy.

JIMHO, the HOA Mgmt side of the house is pretty sleazy with gifts and lack of conflict of interest protections we typically expect for government but are grossly lacking for this quasi-government set up with dependence on commercial entities for guidance.

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I've seen this first hand by sitting on the board.  It's actually very comical to a certain extent.  I found a vendor that was $4k cheaper than the Community Management "recommended" one ($10k bid vs. $14k bid) and got a lot of push back from the CM company.  There were all sorts of excuses to use the $14k company.  One was the $10k vendor's english wasn't that great and the $10k vendor "might" have hidden fees for disposing of the old product.  In the end, we went with the $10k vendor and everything was fine.  In fact, the installation time frame was actually quicker.  $4k is a HUGE difference and CM company didn't seem willing to even entertain the idea.

Villager said:

HOA board meetings are useless whenever the board members aren't actually homeowners, as is the case with any new community until buildout. The board members, more often than not, are reps from TIC and the community management company, who aren't personally invested into the community, and therefore are less likely to make any changes to the CC&R/R&R that are requested by the community.

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There are only a handful of board members and one being a homeowner.  The rest are TIC employees.  It doesn?t sound like it?s going to happen unless there are a ton people pushing for it.  Even the staffed guards have been pushed for by a large number of homeowners and it hasn?t happened yet.  I?ll have to check their financial statements but the answer is always ?no budget?. 

The rest of the board members are TIC employees because no one ran for the available seats. You only have your neighbors to blame for the inaction. TIC doesn't like sitting on these boards longer than they absolutely have to.

I prefer builders staying on the board.  Have you seen what happens when homeowners take over?  Stupid things like speed bumps on the streets everywhere!