Category Archives: firearms

Arizona HOA Law Firms Are Whining

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Anybody who’s seen the ugly insides of the national HOA scam knows that Homeowners Associations are lawsuit machines. In most lawsuits and criminal actions Americans have access to the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution. In the typical Homeowners Association each member unknowingly contracts away that access. Bam! In Pennsylvania Dutch, “there goes the egg money!”

Throw away your access to Due Process and every lawyer within spitting distance knows there’s money to be had. Free money. Your money. Paint your door the wrong color and you get fined, liened, sued and you pay all the HOA’s legal expenses. Lawsuit machines. No other possible description.

In Arizona, a prominent HOA law firm is all upset by a court ruling that says lawyers can’t tack on extra legal fees they rack up trying to garnish the wages of a losing homeowner.

Rest assured, though, this law firm has a number of sneaky plans to hijack this decision. The lawyers win. The lawyers always win.

(link to column by the HOA Institute)

 

Second Arrest in HOA Embezzlement

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They got him! A couple of days ago a longtime HOA manager in San Mateo, California was arrested and accused of stealing 2.8 million dollars from the Woodlake Homeowners Association. Now they’ve arrested her partner, a man who allegedly wrote fake invoices for construction work that was never done. It sure sounds like a copycat of the decade-long swindle of homeowners in Las Vegas.

And it sounds a lot like the multi-million dollar organized crime racketeering swindle of Homeowners Associations in Colorado.

And Homeowners Associations in Florida.

In Alabama.

Virginia.

Texas.

And every other state.

Still, you keep hearing from Realtors, and Congressmen, lawyers, city officials and state representatives that this kind of swindle is extremely rare. What are these guys smoking, anyway?

(link to arrest story in San Mateo Daily Journal)

 

Victories Are Rare!

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It’s not often when a beleaguered homeowner gets a chance to beat up a bullying Homeowners Association, but I do love to see it happen.

I remember my own battles with a Homeowners Association in Morrison, Colorado. My wife had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She had no visible symptoms whatsoever, but the president of the HOA said he would not allow ANY accommodations for a disability. He told us, “well, you’ll just have to move downtown.” I was blown away at his bluntness. But this HOA president, Hatch Wroton, told me, “You know, in a restaurant people just kind of lose their appetite around gimps. They don’t want to see them.”

That was my new awakening that HOAs were too exclusive for blacks, gays, Jews and ‘gimps’ like my wife. Wroton was the former Martin Marietta scientist who designed some of the spacecraft which were destined to land on Mars. But this neighborhood will never escape from the legacy of this anti-Semitic, anti-homosexual, anti-Negro board and its president. There are others to take their place, of course, and the hatred will wax and wane.

But the message is that the extreme bigotry of my HOA is NOT unique. It goes on everywhere.

The story linked below is about a disabled Marine pilot from California who was also treated horribly. They wouldn’t give him access to the community swimming pool. It apparently made the other residents uncomfortable. Never mind that the federal government found their actions illegal. There’s a settlement. The HOA insurance company will pay the elderly couple a hundred thousand bucks if they just take their disabled, disfigured military hero to some other neighborhood.

Photographed in July 2013, Cynthia Campbell kisses her husband, Allen Campbell, to calm him down after he talked about his complaint with their homeowners association. The retired South Natomas couple have settled the case for a six-figure sum – provided they move out after they accused their homeowners association of denying Allen Campbell, a disabled former Marine pilot, access to the community pool.

(link to story on disabled Marine)

 

Embezzlement Allegations

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Well, prosecutors in San Mateo finally nailed a 64 year old HOA manager. She’s accused of embezzling 2.8 million dollars from the Woodlake Homeowners Association. She’s facing a growing heap of charges while police continue to investigate her partner.

Suspect Susan Marie Lambert

My question is, how the heck do you steal nearly three million dollars from a bunch of condo owners? Do you just assume that because they live in condos they must be stupid? Let me put that loss in actual numerals:  $2,800,000.00! Where do you hide it? It can’t be in your pillowcase. It can’t even be under your bed. It would completely fill one of those condo units you supervise!

The big hoot in the story linked below is a quote from Chief Deputy D.A. Karen Guidotti, who says, “It’s obviously an enormous embezzlement. We certainly don’t see them of this magnitude very often.”

Well, Deputy Dawg. You’d better take off those rose-colored glasses and start looking across America. Denver, Colorado, Overland Park, Kansas, Las Vegas, Nevada, just about anywhere in Texas or Pennsylvania, Virginia or Florida. Really, 2.8 million dollars is just an average take in the HOA embezzlement business.

(link to HOA embezzlement story from San Mateo Journal)

 

Backyard Chickens? NIMBY! NIMBY! NIMBY!

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Whew! The racket coming from Clay County, Florida is pretty funny. The county is considering an ordinance that would allow homeowners to own up to four chickens apiece, just no roosters.

Backyard chickens are a growing fad all over the country. But three Homeowners Associations on Fleming Island are kicking up a fuss. They don’t mind chickens elsewhere, but just no chickens where gentrified people can see them. The excuses they give (in the story linked below) are pretty amusing. They’re afraid if a dog sees a chicken and jumps the fence it might injure a child. (Huh?) They’re also afraid a county ordinance would supersede their contractual covenant rights. (It won’t.)

But the squawking and henpecking is really something to behold.

I’ve got a great solution for chicken lovers. Just release a truckload of chickens and roosters into the middle of these HOAs. If you’ve ever vacationed on Kauai you’ve undoubtedly seen some of the tens of thousands of chickens and roosters running wild. Seems a hurricane or two knocked down their pens and they’ve been breeding faster than anyone can hunt them. The screeching and crowing is beyond description.

To me, that sounds like it would be a hoot!

(link to story on Florida chicken controversy)