The Perceived "Hiding" of Legal Actions in 2010
It appears that some believe that the Board inappropriately withheld information during our legal actions against the bogus creation of a “fire district” in 2010. Please allow me to explain the situation and provide the “rest of the story”, as I also did on sheet 3 under “HOA Printer” here on the message board.
In early 2010, Karl Whitmire, who had been trying to sell people on a makeshift volunteer fire brigade for several years, tried to get property owners to approve the creation of a Fire District. He didn’t succeed since very few wanted it, questioning the need and fearing that it would cause in a significant increase in our taxes. A few months later Whitmire decided to take it upon himself to compile a bogus set of CC&Rs in the name of our Ranch, signed them as the Declarant, and recorded them in County Records. His CC&Rs mandated every property owner to pay an additional fee to the “C.C.R.-Property Protection District, Inc”, which was him in reality. He then compiled a mailing list of CCR property owners from County Records and sent monthly bills to as many as he could demanding payment for fire-protection services, cleverly omitting members of the Board from his mailing list, thus delaying our becoming aware of what he was doing. When we did find out, we immediately took legal action against him in Navajo County. We won a court order to remove his CC&Rs and for him to return all monies he had received. This information was reported on page 4 of the Fall 2010 newsletter, which was mailed to every Owner as it is annually (all of our newsletters can be found here on the website under "Newsletters" in the menu). Our attorney continued to pursue additional suits against him in attempts to recover our legal costs, and to make a case for US Mail fraud in the commission of an illegal act. This was in-process when our attorney advised that we should not disclose any information in that regard so as not to prematurely tip our hand. Unfortunately, we were never able to complete this since our attorney advised that there were many legal technicalities that would make this very expensive with little chance for the POA to recover any of the costs since Whitmire was very limited financially and would've simply filed for bankruptcy. His fiasco had already cost the POA $13,000, so spending thousands of dollars more that we could never recover, just to win a case in principle, made it obvious that we had to give it up. I'm sorry if anyone thought we were trying to hide anything.
I feel ya. And again, I'd like to see you attend the next meeting so we can discuss this further.
Honestly, I saw this situation go from 0 to 100 within a day to be a little irrational. Not to mention I don't recall you saying anything two weeks ago at the meeting or afterwards at the potluck making it seem.... nevermind. I'd like to see us work together to make something happen so owners who wish to be left alone without receiving junk mail, unwanted emails, or anything else they bought their property to get away from can be left alone.
And as a side note, maybe you can get with a school or something like the Boys and Girls Club to find age appropriate pen pals for the kids. Try different states so they can learn about different parts of the country? Just a thought.
Margie