You might have heard me bloviating about the Andover Forest Homeownes Association in Kentucky. Seems they were going to start fining and/or suing the family of a three year boy named Cooper.
Cooper has cerebral palsy, you see, and several family doctors have recommended that he be allowed to have a playhouse of his own to help with his therapy.
BAM! That ran into a brick wall of stiff necks at the HOA Board Meeting. “Nobody gets an exemption from the covenents, not even a sick kid!” you can just hear that kind of language being hurled about.
Ah yes, how I remember singing the Texas State Anthem when I was eight or nine years old and studying the Blue Book. Do Texas kids still study the Blue Book, or is that an antique of the 1950’s? “Remember the Alamo, remember San Jacinto!”
Since life in Texas, I migrated to Washington DC, and Germany, and Seattle, before finally settling in Colorado.
But after learning about the national HOA movement, I began thinking that Texans were wimpy little pea-brains who’d passively turned their life savings over to the trial lawyers by moving into covenant-protected neighborhoods. Texas homeowners were being raped by the tort system and weren’t even fighting back.
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.
