For those of you who wanted the votes to pass, I'm sorry it didn't happen for you and I hope you can continue to love and use your ownerships in a way that makes you happy.
For those of you who wanted the votes to fail, I hope you all also continue to love and use your ownerships but don't feel too comfortable yet.
For all of you, it sounds as though it's time to ask some hard and specific questions of your BOD so that next time, if there is a next time, as many owners as possible are involved in the process. It doesn't sound like that happened this time around and a couple things stand out as questionable (at best):
- Any ownership votes, whether they're the usual Annual Meeting votes or votes related to Special Meetings such as this one, require a quorum and every individual ownership is entitled to a ballot. Usually the responsibility for making sure that ballots are issued for every ownership falls on the Management Company, regardless of whether it's an issue brought forth by them or an issue against them that's brought by the BOD or an owner. There are hoops to jump through and costs involved with mailings but you are all better served if you scour the governing docs and learn what you need to know about quorums and voting majorities, etc and how to get ballots/info in the hands of as many owners as possible.
- Ownership contact information may be protected by both state and federal laws, as well as any stipulations in the governing docs. Having watched a similar BOD member-led revolt at a Marriott resort in which a BOD member misused the ownership contact info he'd collected over his time served, which resulted in every Marriott resort's Annual Meeting the next year requiring a vote as to whether owners individually wanted their contact information to remain protected by Marriott (which carried a resounding "yes" vote across all resorts,) I think it's fair to say that you don't want your BOD members to be misusing and abusing any information to which their position gives them access - not if it can be used to help you and definitely not if it can be used to hurt you. Again, scour the docs to learn what's necessary to force the Management Company to compile and send out to every owner whatever vote/informational packets you want sent out, and hold them to their requirements. IMO, giving this power to the BOD members is letting the Management Company off the hook (and, IMO, is too risky when you consider that in the hands of a disgruntled BOD member, an ownership contact information list is a pretty valuable commodity.)
Lastly, welcome to all the Sunset Harbor owners who were led to this thread and TUG through circumstance. I hope you'll stick around and continue contributing - if all you've seen is this thread, you might think about starting with this "
About TUG" page.
