Recall
For the member meeting to recall a board member, ballots must be sent out 10 days before the meeting. Does that mean postmarked 10 days or in time enough the board members receive the ballot 10 days before. I believe members must receive 10 days before to be able to send the ballot back via mail.
Also, the petition was delivered to the management company on a certain date but not to the board until 12 days later via the HOA attorney. What is the 30 day start date for the within 30 days required for the recall meeting.
I believe the management company delivery date as agent for the HOA.
Are we in. A situation where the entire board must be removed?
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I understand that this is all confusing. The HOA Industry likes confusing statutes because they allow them to do whatever they want. Because the statute says “Sent,” that is considered or at least interpreted by the Industry as postmarked. The 30 days apply from the date the petition is delivered to the association to the date the members’ meeting is held.
To satisfy the law, the notice of meeting must be “sent” 20 days after the petition is delivered to allow the meeting to be held 10 days later.
The ballots are a different thing; they must be “delivered” to the member seven days before the date by which they must be “delivered” to the board. The use of the different terms in these statutes implies different things, but has been interpreted by the HOA lawyers to all favor the association. The industry interpretation is that both “sent” and “delivered”, when used relative to the association, are postmarked. But the term “delivered”, when it applies to the homeowner, means received by the association. This is very convenient for them but puts the homeowner at a real disadvantage, because if it takes three days for the mail to get to you and to get back, then you only have one day to vote under this interpretation scheme. That was never the intention of the legislature, as that would be irrational.
Delivered and sent cannot mean the same thing when used in the same statute. The postmark is sent and delivered when it is received. I’ve been trying to clarify these statutes for years and have a detailed proposal that will address both statutes. Now we need to get them fixed to put an end to this madness.
The petition is considered delivered to the association when it is either delivered by hand to any board member or any agent of the association. The clock started when the petition was delivered to the management company.
All of this is very important; the 30-day clock starts when the petition is delivered and ends on the 30th day after that. If the meeting was not held in that time frame, the entire board is removed at midnight on the 31st day.
Dennis