Our latest Property Owners Association meeting ended without bloodshed. But just barely.
We were fighting mad about the agenda items: Open range. Shared well water. Rutted roads.
City-dwellers with their wimpy HOAs have no idea how big a brawl you can have when you have no filters, no facts, and own lots of land.
Mind you we’re talking the miles of rolling hills and juniper trees northeast of Show Low, Arizona. And, yes, you can join me and Gene Autry in singing, “Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play …” because we are well beyond city limits and city services. We don’t get water, sewer, and trash pickup handed to us. We do get rural electricity, but we’re on our own for the rest of the stuff.
Our far-flung neighbors are self-sufficient, rugged individuals. They build riding arenas and oversee miles of fence line. They like their diesel dually equipped with a gun rack, a winch, and a tank for hauling water. And whether they like it or not (spoiler alert: they don’t) they are in a Property Owners Association.
Thus, when they’re summoned to a POA meeting the fight is on.
I still shudder at the memory of the meeting in which a woman at the front of the room reached the boiling point in an argument with a man in the back. Never mind that she was a shrimp who looked like she was sitting down when she was standing up. Never mind that he looked like Sasquatch. She stood in the middle of the aisle and screamed a litany of abuse at him, ending with “and FU.” Not the letters, the words.
Holy Bad Word, Batman! Let the minutes reflect that Mr. Suspenders, the Treasurer, had to talk Shorty off the ledge and get her back to her seat while Sasquatch fumed and turned various shades of purple.
Let the minutes show that we sang the next verse, “Where often is heard a discouraging word and the cussing gets worse every day.” No, sorry. No singing but instead someone else throwing gas on the fire.
That would be the aggressive, I’m-in-charge flatlander who thought he had all the answers. Oy vey! He was already persona non grata because he was a flatlander. He may have owned property but he lived in Phoenix. Let me tell you the people who developed their property, whether they built a Southfork (that’s the luxury ranch where J.R. Ewing lives for those of you who watched Dallas) or hauled in a pre-fabricated home, they’re the real deal.
They look at your footwear and sneer at your sneakers, sandals, or polished Tony Lamas. They’ll be the first to tell you that you didn’t settle the land and they’ll find a way to say something derogatory about buffed and fluffed Scottsdale (motto: The West’s Most Western Town. True story).
So anyway, Dudey-Dude’s testosterone levels are running high. He’s wearing his expensive boots which have never seen the inside of a corral. He’s a lawyer and he is going to get this mess straightened out pronto, so listen up.
He got drowned out by other people shouting to be heard and still other people shouting for the shouters to shut up.
So yeah, that’s pretty much how our meetings go. The meeting minutes usually say something like “Discussion about whether to have the road graded.”
Also, you can imagine that being an officer on the POA Board is a treat. One year there was so much bad blood between a mob-ette of property owners and the Board that all but one of the Board members quit. The remaining Board member, after scrutinizing the 532 pages of CC&Rs, realized she could unilaterally tap replacement members to fill the vacated spots. So, she did. She loaded up the Board with friendlies and off they went, running the POA fairly well until the next election.
And that’s when the flit hit the shan. The disenfranchised mob-ette had been fomenting and their leader, a woman that Frank Sinatra had in mind when he sang “I Did it My Way,” ran for Secretary. You’d think Madam My Way would run for President, but evidently, she knew she didn’t have the votes and thought she’d get more traction as Second Banana. And she was right. Madam got her neighbor, an easily manipulated liked-by-all fellow, to run for President. She got herself in as Secretary and now (tell me you see this coming) she runs the show.
Which explains what happened next.
Evidently in her spitting match with the previous Board, My Way had run up some legal fees she needed to pay. On behalf of the new POA Board, her people, she did a mailing to members soliciting our vote on whether we should pull almost $4,000 out of the POA budget for her lawyer.
The vote was presented as a Membership Advisory Ballot and it gave us a deadline to return our responses checked off in the “yes” or “no” box. There wasn’t an “Are you kidding me?” box or a “No, pay your own bills” box.
The results of the vote would be announced at the next meeting which conveniently was being held on a workday, instead of the usual Saturday. Madam My Way is no fool.
The handful of us who showed up found out that the actual vote was Board-only and our Membership Advisory Ballots were just some kind of litmus test to see how much of a fuss we’d make. To no one’s surprise Madam’s five-crony Board voted a unanimous “yes.” Bada bing. Bada boom.
The meeting minutes will probably say: Discussion about stacking the deck, misuse of funds, and whether to grade the road.
After one meltdown meeting, before Madam and her henchmen came to power and were still in the audience creating chaos, Glenn vowed to capture the next episode of POA Unleashed on camera. He figured that if the outlaws and outliers knew they were being videoed they’d keep a lid on the crazy. Believe it or not, this strategy worked.
He positioned himself and his fully charged iPhone at the front of the room, by the Board table (incredibly no one objected) and filmed the entire meeting. There were one or two outbursts and Madam’s no-filter husband stood up and called everyone an “a**hole” but most of the video showed sedate activity and low-key conduct. Hallelujah.
Would you believe one spoilsport wants to dissolve our POA? True story. This yahoo made a motion that got seconded to do away with our main form of entertainment. If that happens, what will My Way be in charge of? Where will we go for our Shouting Therapy? Stay tuned.
The Upstory 