What is “reasonable amount of time”?
Hi Dennis,
Seriously this site is the best thing ever; thank you! So I’ve been looking through the laws but haven’t found anything concrete with regard to what is considered “reasonable time”. Here’s a scenario.
The board puts forward a motion to vote on X in a meeting. Another board member seconds it and then asks the community for their input. However, the community is only made aware of this during the time it happened. The community is not given any information to review ahead of time prior to the motion/vote. It all happens in real-time.
Is this legal? How is it expected that the community is able to ask educated questions about X if they literally just found out about it minutes prior?
A specific example – is the fiscal budget. Our HOA STILL does not have an approved budget for 2023 (remember 41 houses here. Our CC&Rs state that it must be approved by 12/31 before the start of the new fiscal year). To date, the board refuses to share any budget information or proposals. However, there is a meeting on 6/13 where it’s anticipated that the board will vote to pass a budget. Yet the community has been given no budget proposals to review. The community members have asked for months to see these proposals but the board is refusing to share them as they are not ‘officially approved documents’.
Is this actually legal or normal practice? There is absolutely no way the community can be prepared to ask questions or voice their concerns on something they are being denied the ability to see.
Thanks!
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Lori,
The board actions are both legal and very common under the current law. The problem is what the board should do to engage and inform the community is not in the law. The law identifies what you can or cannot do not what you should do. Unfortunately, in a planned community the meeting is a board meeting and while you are entitled to attend and participate in those meeting you are not entitled to advance access to background information on issues to be discussed by the board. When I say entitled, I mean under the law.
To help mitigate this I’ll be proposing legislation again this year that would require the board to post an agenda of what will be discussed a minimum of 48 hours prior to any board meeting along with the notice of that meeting. While this only helps in a slight way it at least informs the community of what will be discussed at that meeting and gives you an opportunity to attend and participate in the discussion for that issue.
As for budgets the current law does provide for distribution of proposed budgets 30 days in advance of a meeting to approve that budget for a condominium but not for a planned community. The reason is ownership. In a condo the owners own everything and pay for everything, in a planned community the association owns all the common property, and the budget is for the maintenance and management of that common property, even though once again the owners still pay for everything.
The law will never provide for the approval of budgets by the members for a planned community but could be arranged that way for a condominium, but I’ll see what I can do to at least make sure that in a planned community any proposed budget is provided along with notice and agenda of that meeting.
While this is clearly not the answer that you were looking for, I’ve been doing this for some time now and I have a fairly clear picture of what types of changes to the law have any chance of getting passed and which do not. There simply is not enough time and energy available to attempt anything more.
Dennis
Wow, thank you, Dennis. We are a small planned community but we do have private roadways. You definitely opened my eyes. It’s sad that the laws are like this. All we can do is our part and petition to have board members removed that fail to uphold their duties, act on their own behalf and break the laws/cc&rs.
Thank you.