ADRE
Dennis,
I filed a complaint with ADRE. ADRE has received my complaint and I have aid th $500.
I am thinking the ADRE will serve notice.
What I don’t know is what happens now
Maybe you or one of your subscribers has experience in this process
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A member of the ADRE staff will provide the association with your petition and allow them an opportunity to respond. You will then be provided whatever they respond, and you can either withdraw your petition or stay with it. From there if you continue it will be sent to the Office of Administrative Hearings for scheduling. In the past you were able to cancel your petition and get a full refund from ADRE as long as a schedule for your hearing had not been established. Under the current administration your application fee can only be refunded prior to ADRE sending your petition to AOH.
If OAD schedules a hearing, you will then be required to attend that hearing and establish your evidence to support your petition. The burden of proof is totally on you. the association has no responsibility to prove that they did not violate the law or the governing documents. You can be assured that their attorney will throw any and all arguments they can to the ALJ and hope that they can intimidate them the way they try to intimidate all of you.
In the past the ALJ’s did a pretty good job of guiding the homeowners thru the hearing process and providing a fair and accurate ruling on the facts of the case. Since the end of the pandemic and since the current administration, I’ve lost total faith of in the competence or fairness of the ALJ’s. It is my belief from reading case summaries that most of the current crop of ALJ’s simply buy the argument of the association attorneys against the arguments of the homeowners.
When these petitions were first allowed the win rate for homeowners was around 50% but currently, they are closer to 5 to 10% of the cases. But worse yet the OAH has simply stopped publishing case decisions on the web site, the latest published case decision relative to HOA issues was in October 2023. so much for government transparency. The only way I get to see case decisions is from the party involved. The acting director of OAH I guess is simply tired of hearing from me on the errors of his judges.
Dennis
We did a petition for 4 issues. First our committee meetings are not putting out minutes, 2 issues pertaining to required documents not being made available and the last for documentation requested that took over a month to receive.
We won the minutes argument and the documentation over the 10 day argument. My recommendation is keep your arguments short and to the point, too much information seems to confuse them. Our HOA mgmt company removed all our documents from our property when they took over in 2020 and the attorney’s argument was they don’t have to provide documents they don’t have. Also…they only look at state statute violations and governing documents violations…NOTHING ELSE, so don’t give them back up on anything they don’t look at. And finally if you are representing yourself, you will be cross examining them…but not the attorney, so get your questions together to help prove your case. The fact that the documents were not available not because they didn’t have them; but because the mgmt company removed them from the property…which violated our governing documents didn’t matter because the attorney just kept stating they didn’t have to provide what they did not have.
I agree with all your points. The arguments of the attorneys are baseless but not something that can be argued before an ALJ. As a non-profit corporation the association is required to maintain their corporate records, because a management company never returned their records they were obliged to sue that company until they received all their corporate records. Unfortunately, those requirements are in the non-profit corporation act and not in either the planned community or condominium act and therfore not something that the ALJ can adjudicate. Until I can get more specific language into the common interest community statutes this BS argument will hold for all cases heard before an ALJ.
Dennis
Dennis,
Regarding cases that have gone before the OAH and are no longer pulblished within the” Administrative Law Judge Decisions” section. Do you think that it would be possible and benieficial to post the case numbers by coalition members who have gone before the OAH whether they lost or won their cases as a resource for those members who may be considering this same action. For instance under the resources & tools pull down tab. I would be more than happy to share my case number because as you mentioned it is not listed on the OAH website.
The reason I think this might be a valuable tool is because I personally have gained a wealth of knowledge and insight by reading the cases still posted on OAH site. I have spent hours reading and studying to the best of my knowledge why cases are won and lost. It’s a great tool for preparing one:s own case before traveling down this legal path. Anyway, its just a thought that came to mind as I read some of the stories within this forum. By the way your OAH cases have helped me personally and I beleive that they were a big factor in helping me preppair and win my OAH case. I will once again be submitting a new OAH case and the previously posted OAH cases have been super helpful, however if we could review even more recent OAH cases that would be so helpful in seeing where the tide of the OAH is flowing. Thanks Dennis.
Bob
Robert,
I agree with you, but the reality is that it is the responsibility of the Office of Administrative hearing to publish the case records of all cases decided by the ALJ’s. I’ve discussed the issue of the lack of case decisions publishing direct with the Acting Director of the agency. It may be a result of me complaining to him on the competence of his judges to understand the fundamental principle of law affecting these communities or the fundamental rules of statutory construction and interpretation as established by the Arizona Supreme Court especially since the pandemic and the election of our current Governor. If enough citizens write the Governor thru her web site complaining about the OAH’s lack of upkeep of their case decision log on their web site maybe something will change. While I could post some decisions on my site that anyone provides to me that is a labor-intensive task and I’m only one person and have better things to do with my time. What we really need is for the Department to do their job and update and post their case decision rulings once they are finalized.
Dennis
Dennis,
I went to the Governor’s website to share my thoughts and concerns about OAH case postings. My question is this: do you know if that should be stated under ” Voice Your Opinion”? Maybe there is another more direct way, just asking.
Thanks,
Bob
That is the place.