It’s always a sad day when a person in a position of trust violates the confidence he or she is given. It’s even sadder when the victims are elderly homeowners who’ve worked all their lives to save their money for retirement.
Homeowners Association boards and Property Management Companies, though, probably have more embezzlers than any other industry in America.
The latest arrest of a suspected embezzler happened in early July in St. Augustine, Florida. This blogger will enthusiastically post her name: she is 57 year old June Elizabeth Supko. She’s accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the Captain’s Quarters Condominium Association.
Hallelujah! It took years, but members of the Sunchase Condominiums in North Austin have decided to quit being stupid. Sunchase homeowners have been paying dues for years, but their HOA board and the property manager, Nancy Thompson, refused to show them the books! Last time I looked, Texas law mandated that HOA members be allowed to see where their dues are going.
Homeowners have poured more than a million dollars down a black hole that hasn’t been audited in more than five years. Readers of this blog know that I’ve got a very low tolerance for the stench rising from tens of thousands of HOAs in almost identical situations. And Sunchase stinks to high heaven!
Everybody else has reported on this already, but I should at least get my take on the record. So here it is:
In Aurora, Colorado, a Homeowners Association is threatening to ruin the family of a three year old girl who uses colored chalk to draw flowers and hearts on the sidewalks in front of her home.
Seems that some wicked witch in the cul-de-sac complained that the chalk drawings were against the covenants and destroying the value of the neighborhood. The child, Emerson Cohen, is mystified at the dispute, but her mother is furious.
At long last a Texas HOA is getting some much-deserved attention. Sadly, it took a homeowners lawsuit to get the ball rolling. Folks in the Sunchase HOA in Northeast Austin are wondering where a million bucks went. It just kind of wandered off someplace. It’s illegal for a Texas HOA not to have regular audits of their books. Of course, it’s also illegal to filch a million bucks, IF that’s what happened. And Sunchase hasn’t had an audit for at least five years.
Now that I’m out of mainstream journalism, I can afford to occasionally get my hackles up at the kinds of things written by other journalists. Indeed, most reporters don’t write their own headlines, but this one got my goat. It was an article in Main Street, a real estate magazine, which discussed the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. The headline said, “Homeowners Association Could be “Eden” of Liabilities.
The headline writer was correct, of course. And the reporter, Jeff Brown, was also correct in saying that questions about legal liabilities could “wreck your worry-free Eden.”
