Those Southern Mississippi boys shore know how to screw up a state!
The new community of Diamondhead is holding its first city election. The law allows political signs to be placed anywhere except city property. But the Diamondhead Property Owners Association doesn’t allow any political signs either. Unless you’re a Republican. Mayoral candidate Carl Necaise put his political signs out in the yards of people who weren’t actually in the POA. And he’s ordered his opponent’s signs removed because they happened to be in the front yards of people who actually are POA members.
Amanda Rhett must have thought she was living on a different planet last week. She had to face the board of the West Trop Homeowners Association to defend herself against a photograph showing two pieces of dog poop in the private back patio area of her home.
The offending feces were left by Amanda’s little miniature Yorkie. It’s not like this terrier was terrorizing the neighborhood by depositing ‘S’ bombs in all the common areas. It was two dog poops the size of a child’s little finger on this lady’s private patio.
In my forty years doing investigative reporting for all three major networks, I don’t think I remember even hearing of a Homeowners Association problem more than once a decade. All of a sudden that’s just about all anyone’s talking about.
There are newly proposed bills in Colorado, Texas, Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, California and a half dozen other states I can’t immediately bring to mind. Most of these proposed laws are aimed at curbing the rampant abuse by Homeowners Associations against individual homeowners.
Did you get that? HOA boards abusing homeowners? Individual citizens who theoretically should have certain God-given rights under the Declaration of Independence and the entirety of the U.S. Constitution?
They’re often called SLAPP lawsuits, a frivolous suit filed just to shut up an annoying critic. The acronym stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” SLAPPS were sometimes used by major companies to hush up environmentalists. Sometimes it was used the other way around. The bottom line was that lawyers were hired to cause the other side great expense and great anxiety, nothing more, nothing less.
What’s difficult to understand about the word ‘accountability’? Texas is one of a number of states where legislation is pending which would reign in the massive power of private HOA management companies. Homeowners in Texas, and elsewhere, are tired of being ripped off by arbitrary fines, punitive social controls, predatory towing of vehicles, confiscatory debt collection practices, abusive lawsuits, and massive embezzlement from the budgets of Homeowners Associations. This is not a hard problem to understand. Your home is your castle. Isn’t it?
