The April 2018 Meeting
As mentioned on my 2018 Recommendations page, Matt totally disrupted the April 2018 board meeting, and you can listen to the 10-minute rant and decide for yourself.
He accused me as a board member of getting “special treatment” by not getting a violation notice for not having a tree in my yard. Had Matt bothered to prepare himself for the meeting, he would have seen my violation notices and my appeal in the packet of material sent to all board members, and saved himself the embarrassment of making such a false statement at the meeting and in the NextDoor online forum. (Or maybe he wasn’t embarrassed about making false statements.)
He also told Dan (board member Julia’s boyfriend) that he wasn’t a member of the community because he wasn’t on the property’s ownership documents – the implication being that “only homeowners are community members”. Matt went on to malign the marital status of Dan and Julia (listen to this in the audio) – apparently in this day and age Matt thinks unmarried people shouldn’t live together (he’s entitled to his opinion), and he has no problem pointing the fingers at residents who don’t meet his high standards (he isn’t entitled to publicly malign members of the community!).
The whole meeting – all 10 minutes of it – was just bizarre, unprofessional, and all about Matt shouting at anyone and everyone in the room. Our only alternative at the time was to adjourn the meeting. Andres and I called for a Special Board Meeting held a couple of weeks later, to allow the board to catch up on some business it needed to attend to, as well as deal with the aftermath of Matt’s tirade and disruption.
The February 2018 Meeting
Matt thought he was going to disrupt the February board meeting by leaving within the first few minutes. There were only three directors present (Julia, Matt, and me), which is the minimum required for a quorum at board meetings (with 5 directors total). When Matt wasn’t about to get his way on a vote (we were considering who would be the new chairperson for the Landscape Committee), he “threatened” to leave and force the end of the meeting due to a lack of quorum.
What Matt didn’t know is that our Bylaws state that once a quorum of directors is achieved, the quorum continues even in the absence of the number of directors required attain a quorum. After he found out that we could continue the meeting in his absence, he decided to stay.
The 2017 Annual Member Meeting
The annual member meeting in 2017 was, in my opinion, a total fiasco. There’s some additional information on that meeting here and here.
Basically, Matt wouldn’t allow consideration of having a “continued meeting” on Saturday morning following the annual meeting to continue with the election. See, we were 2 people short of a quorum – something we could have easily attained by restarting the meeting on Saturday morning in the park off of Roma. But he hastily attempted to adjourn the meeting… in my opinion, in an intentional effort to keep an election from happening.
What I ultimately determined the next day was that the quorum calculations were flawed, and that a quorum was indeed officially attained. I informed the board of this information, and after consulting with the association attorney, agreed that quorum was met and the election should have proceeded. The ballots were counted at a kludged-together meeting on a Wednesday in October, and the new board complement was elected.
Our community manager took the blame for the quorum error, but the fact that Matt (as President of the Association and responsible for the conduct of the Annual Meeting) failed to understand the quorum requirements as well.
Violation of ARS 33-1804(A)5
Arizona Revised Statutes Title 33 has a number of rules pertaining to HOAs. Among those rules is ARS 33-1804 which relates to the requirement for Open Meetings of HOAs, and specifically outlines the exceptions allowed in order to conduct an “Executive Session” (a meeting not open to participation of homeowners, unless specifically invited).
Paragraph A Item 5 specifically says that a board can meet in closed/executive session for:
Discussion of a member’s appeal of any violation cited or penalty imposed by the association except on request of the affected member that the meeting be held in an open session.
During Matt’s tenure as President in the second half of the previous board term, two of your Rio Crossing neighbors asked to have their violation appeals held in open session, but Matt only permitted the homeowners to make their statements in open session – he expressly forbade the discussion of the appeal by the board in the open session, instead continuing the discussion in closed session.
I had previously written to Matt via Email, indicating that continuing the discussion in closed session was a violation of the Arizona Statute. Apparently he didn’t care whether he was conducting the closed discussions legally or not.