We’ve frequently talked in this blog about thieves who steal from their Homeowners Associations. There’s another one. There’s always another one.
Douglas Gilpatrick Tulper, a treasurer for the Legacy Park Men’s Club took almost 18,000 dollars from his organization which is part of the Legacy Park Community Association in Kennesaw, Georgia. He says he needed it to pay bills.
His attorney may use his age as an excuse. He’s 78. But the problem isn’t age, or senility, or dementia. The problem is that HOA officers can do whatever the heck they want to with other people’s money. There is no oversight. There are no rules. And where there is no oversight, greed has no chains. It’s extremely rare when somebody actually gets caught.
With several dozen Las Vegas Homeowner Associations mired in the muck of a federal corruption investigation, members of one association have learned they may be targeted by huge IRS assessments and fines.
Sun City Summerlin Community Association is not one of the Nevada HOAs where investigators have found corrupt cops and judges and lawyers. But this HOA’s accounting practices are attracting lots of federal attention.
Seven youngsters in the Twin Cities area will always remember the winter they learned to skate.
On a small piece of land where their backyards adjoined, their dads nailed some boards on top of one another. When the Minnesota skies turned frigid, the families turned on their garden hoses and filled the enclosure with water. It froze over, and they poured in another inch of water. Then another.
Whenever the news media start trolling for stories about HOA abuse, they seem to be buried with them. This was one of many uncovered by reporter J. David McSwane, of Denver’s Westword Magazine.
He reports that Angela Quinn, a resident in an HOA in Western Washington, was told she could not have an air conditioner in her rental home. She says her neighbor had an A/C unit, and since she was in her third trimester of pregnancy, she figured she could install one in a back window which was not visible from the street.
Despite a few changes in law in such states as Texas and Arizona, Homeowners Associations are developing an increasingly bad reputation because of the ongoing spate of news stories about homeowners abused by the HOA system. Homeowners wrongly believe that HOAs are created to maintain property values and help homeowners get along with each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
