Secret Meetings

At the January 2010 Director’s meeting I made the assertion that an illegal executive session was held in August 2009. I wrote about it here. The board categorically denied that such a session had been held. Understand, my complaint was that the session had been held, but no mention was made in the minutes of that meeting. It became a little surreal when they started using the minutes to prove the session hadn’t happened. At the end of the meeting in August the president of the HOA board of Directors said “since I have talked to the lawyer I would like to hold a briefly go into executive session um, to discuss that”. I know that is what she said because I recorded the meeting, at least that is as close as I can transcribe from the recording. You can hear it here , the statement of the President is at the 1:23:20 mark.

Now recording meetings of the HOA is against the rules, thank goodness I decided to break that rule or there would be no way to prove that the statement I made was correct and the statements the board made were not correct. It would have been my word against theirs and the matter would have ended there. There are only a couple explanations for this discrepancy. We now know for a fact that the President did indeed announce an Executive session several minutes before that session took place, it is reasonable to believe that session did take place. So why was I told the session didn’t take place? The most obvious answer is that I was simply lied to at the January meeting. The next logical scenario is that I wasn’t lied to but that it is such common practice for the board to hold secret meetings that no one remembers holding that session, quite frankly I find that more troubling than I was lied to.

It is obvious the term “executive session” was used, it is also obvious that the President knew she was using it in the correct context since she mentions speaking to the lawyer, speaking to a lawyer could be a legitimate reason for holding an executive session. What makes me think they held the session and didn’t know they were supposed to keep minutes or announce the purpose of the meeting or worse knew but didn’t care is that in the course of discussing this matter in the January meeting they mentioned that they had “gotten together” the night before the August meeting.

This is serious people, we have a board of directors and a community manager with twenty years experience that hold secret meetings and don't even know they did it. Paula said they got together (I had to be careful to not use the word "met") to discuss issues pertaining to the HOA "to get our act together" as she said (50:40 mark).
None of us were invited, minutes were not kept and no homeowners knew about it, but it wasn't a secret meeting. If meeting (oops, "getting together") to discuss HOA business without anyone knowing about it then or now isn't a secret meeting I don't know what is. Just because no decisions were made doesn't mean that a meeting wasn't held, I've been to far too many business meetings where no decisions were made, they were still meetings. We as citizens not only have the right to know what the final decision was, we have the right to know how that decision was reached, what were the discussions, what documents were shown, the debates, who was for or against an issue or solution at the outset and what argument was used to persuade them to change their minds if they did.

Why do you think most of the decisions made by this board are unanimous? They held the meeting days before we all got together, the monthly meeting is just a formality. The problem is these are good people, they aren't doing this maliciously, they think this is the way they are supposed to act, this isn't good government, good government is open government.

This also isn’t the first time our minutes have been poorly lacking, in the July meeting Paula mentioned to Jim that she and someone else in the community had received letters for the same violation but one was afforded a grace period and the other wasn’t, He said that that was “Hildegard’s shorthand and that is all I can say about that” I was shocked that someone under the indirect employ of the board would be allowed to have “shorthand” and that Jim would be allowed to not give an explanation, these documents are sent under signature of the board of Directors for crying out loud. The board seemed to gloss over that remark, odd I thought, I wonder how that will be handled in the minutes, it simply wasn’t, absolutely no mention of that entire section of the meeting was included in the minutes.

This leads me to the conclusion that all meetings of this board need to be tape recorded and published on the website within a reasonable amount of time, say 48 hours. These recordings should be considered official documents. It should also be made clear to this board that any time any three or more of them are in the same location whether it is in person or electronic it is a meeting and should be recorded and minutes taken, no exceptions. Personal recording equipment should also be allowed to be used by citizens of Todd Creek Farms. As long as it is against the rules of TCF HOA to record meetings it could be problematic to use a recording of the meetings in a court of law if needed.

In the February meeting I will ask that the meetings be officially recorded and that private recording equipment be allowed, I know there are two board members that will not be present for this meeting this will give them time to give a proxy vote to another member of the board.