gaining order, sidetracking meetings in this manner wastes everyone’s time. However, for the lonely owner the longer the meeting the better. Remember the lonely owner has little other entertainment or hobbies to take up their time. The board meeting may be the entertainment of the evening and if it goes on for hours, that means there are less hours to spend alone.


This final personality example in community associations presenting obstacles is the uneducated or entitled personality. Uneducated homeowners or board members use their thoughts and feelings to make business decisions. Some notable comments include, “I don’t think this will work” or “some of us feel this won’t work.” They will even increase the disruption by including others who may not have weighed into the topic by saying, “everyone” rather than just “I.” These personality types must be guided away from emotional thinking when conducting business on behalf of all homeowners. Emotional decisions made for one owner’s pet peeve, such as the homeowner who wants the flower garden no matter the cost or the one who wants the roof patched because they don’t want to spend the money for needed roof replacement, only satisfy that one emotional person. Those decisions do not serve the community as whole.


Besides personalities, there are often SECRET AGENDAS.


These obstacles describe homeowners who run for and/or join the board with an agenda that only a small group of owners may know. An extreme example of a secret agenda is firing the manager. When an owner’s account was placed into collections in keeping with the community collection policy, the owner approached the manager to ask that the account not be turned over to the association attorney for legal action. Unfortunately, the manager had to refuse since the community rules and regulations alerted owners to the collection process and there was a collection policy for accounts that were past due. The homeowner felt it was completely within the manager’s control whether to turn the account over for collection, and that the manager was being malicious in turning the account over despite their request. The association’s decision to turn over accounts within a given time period was to preserve their opportunity to collect a part of the bad debt, because a bankruptcy filing can take away the association’s ability to fully collect the total past due debt. The owner took the manager’s refusal personally and put their feelings of revenge into play by running for the board. Once on the board, the owner at once began advocating for firing the manager or replacing the management company.


Turning away from personalities, we can also see obstacles in community associations where FINANCIAL CONTROL


becomes a major issue for those owners who simply disagree with spending choices, despite the condition of the building. As replacing the flowers with a rock garden was thoroughly investigated, the board felt it their fiduciary duty to do what was logically presented as a sound idea.


50 | COMMON INTEREST® • Fall 2024 • A Publication of CAI-Illinois Chapter


There is no doubt financial power and control are driving factors for why people run for a seat on their community association board of directors. It is admirable to track your money, but when power and control conflict with what is best for the whole community it becomes an obstacle that takes years to overcome.


These financial agendas are often hidden, and unconcerned with maintenance realities. These secret agendas may lead to careless spending or spending unwisely as these owners typically take short cuts or the lower bids that may call for replacing only necessary components and not those expenditures which could be more cost efficient in the long term. These owners fight for assessment caps or decreases because they foresee on a personal basis not having enough money to pay future assessment increases. An example is roof replacement. Let’s say the community needs a new roof, but the cost of a new roof would call for a loan and the secret agenda board member does not want a loan. The roofer says, you can patch the roof, but the areas that are not patched will continually require service since underlying elements like a failed waterproof membrane will not be replaced in a patch scenario. No matter, the secret agenda will come into play and the owner will say, “If we don’t urgently need a whole roof, I vote to patch the existing roof and save money.” There is no question, money is saved in the short term by not fully replacing the roof. Yes, patching fixes the more urgent problems. What is typically revealed later is patching for the remaining year where the water proofing failed ends up costing more overall due to repetitive patching of multiple locations. An example of a secret agenda in baseball is a player going after their own personal statistics for notoriety instead of contributing to increasing the team’s overall record.


Community association boards rely on professional managers, their advice and guidance. Those designations behind your community association manager’s name, and the designations behind the names of other community professional partners, represent education, experience and industry training on which you can rely. These professionals provide resources and know best practices for boards and can assist you in guiding your communities to good decisions. Like the famous quote says, “There’s no crying in baseball.” There is no crying in community association management either. Managers working in this field consciously decide to work with the known and unknown obstacles, be they hidden or not. The job is not for the faint of heart. The rewarding part is not winning the game; it’s successfully improving the lives of people on your team and in the community.


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