Category Archives: Handicap

Should HOAs be eligible for FEMA Public Assistance?

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guest blog by Deborah Goonan

I have previously written about Community Associations Institute (CAI), an HOA trade group, and its three Federal issues (pet peeves). One of those issues is what CAI calls Disaster Relief Fairness.

You can check out CAI’s brochure on the subject here. See pages 9-10.

https://www.caionline.org/Advocacy/FederalAdvocacy/Documents/CAI_FedAdvocacy.pdf

CAI laments:

Community association homeowners pay federal taxes to fund emergency services and disaster response, but their communities receive little or no federal support in the wake of a presidentially declared national disaster. Association homeowners bear the financial and practical burdens of disaster recovery in ways that non-association homeowners do not. This leads to uneven disaster recovery in our towns and cities across the country and is fundamentally unfair to association homeowners.

Yes, we all pay taxes, so why should FEMA discriminate against HOAs?

On the surface, who can disagree with that? As readers are well aware by now, owners in Association-Governed Residential Communities are already double taxed. We pay for essential services provided by our Associations through assessments, but also pay for essential services to areas outside HOA boundaries by way of property taxes.

But, not so fast. To understand FEMA’s role in disaster relief, let’s look at the type of relief they are authorized to provide:

FEMA link explaining type of assistance available.
http://www.fema.gov/disaster-assistance-available-fema

Basically, FEMA may provide assistance with temporary housing, relocation expenses, repair to primary residences, and emergency services that provide for basic needs immediately following the disaster. With regard to repair of a primary residence, assistance is intended to supplement insurance coverage, and, in FEMA’s words, “The goal is to make the damaged home safe, sanitary, and functional.”

The fact is, aid is only available if your home’s location is in a federally declared disaster zone. And the total amount of assistance available depends on what is appropriated by Congress. Assistance is divided into two categories: Individual Assistance and Public Assistance.

Individual Assistance dollars are intended to help individuals and households with various housing and disaster recovery expenses that have not been covered by insurance. FEMA will assist homeowners and tenants located in a disaster designated zone, regardless of whether their home is located within some sort of Association or not. The focus is on making sure the individuals involved have safe housing, but not necessarily guaranteeing that the assistance will enable the individuals to return to the same housing that was damaged in the disaster.

Public Assistance is defined by FEMA as follows:

Public Assistance (PA): Disaster grant assistance available for communities to quickly respond to and recover from major disasters or emergencies declared by the President

Emergency Work (Categories A-B): Work that must be performed to reduce or eliminate an immediate threat to life, protect public health and safety, and to protect improved property that is significantly threatened due to disasters or emergencies declared by the President

Permanent Work (Categories C-G): Work that is required to restore a damaged facility, through repair or restoration, to its pre-disaster design, function, and capacity in accordance with applicable codes and standards

Public Assistance dollars are earmarked for certain Eligible Applicants:

1. State Government Agencies

2 . Local Governments and Special Districts

3. Certain Private Non-Profit Organizations

4. Native American Tribal Governments and Villages

As you can see below, HOAs do not fit the criteria for the types of non-profit organizations eligible for FEMA Public Assistance: (because HOAs are not “open to the general public” and do not provide the specific public services specified below)

Private Non-Profit Organizations
Private Nonprofit organizations or institutions that own or operate facilities that are open to the general public and that provide certain services otherwise performed by a government agency.

These services include:
Education
Colleges and universities
Parochial and other private schools

Utility
Systems of energy, communication, water supply, sewage collection and treatment, or other similar public service facilities.

Emergency
Fire protection, ambulance, rescue, and similar emergency services.

Medical
Hospital, outpatient facility, rehabilitation facility, or facility for long-term care for mental or physical injury or disease.

Custodial Care
Homes for the elderly and similar facilities that provide institutional care for persons who require close supervision, but do not require day-to-day medical care.

Other Essential Governmental Services
Museums, zoos, community centers, libraries, homeless shelters, senior citizen centers, rehabilitation facilities, shelter workshops and facilities that provide health and safety services of a governmental nature. Health and safety services are essential services that are commonly provided by all local governments and directly affect the health and safety of individuals. Low-income housing, alcohol and drug rehabilitation, programs for battered spouses, transportation to medical facilities, and food programs are examples of health services.

http://www.fema.gov/public-assistance-eligible-applicants

As an example, we can take a look at what’s going on in South Carolina now, in the wake of widespread flooding caused by record-breaking rainfall and the failure of dozens of dams, most of which are owned and maintained by private homeowner associations.

Current FEMA appropriations stand as follows:

Individual Assistance dollars obligated: $112.7 million

Public Assistance dollars obligated: $6.3 million, all of it earmarked for Category A and B only. That is, only emergency repairs, and not restoration.

Source:

http://www.fema.gov/disaster/4241/?utm_source=hp_promo&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=fema_hp

What does this mean for residents, particularly homeowners in HOAs, Condominiums, or Cooperatives?

But remember, even though a single dam repair can cost hundreds of thousands or even more than a million dollars, HOAs will not be receiving any of that assistance, because they are private non-profit organizations that FEMA classifies as business entities. (Where have we heard that before?)

Recall that the original premise behind HOAs was to create new housing and increase the tax base of local governments, but with minimal impact upon that local government’s operating budget. In return, developers were granted dominion over private communities during construction, Association Boards were granted exceptional powers to manage community affairs without government interference, and homeowners were granted the supposed prestige and privilege of living in a more-or-less self-contained housing community.

At the time, when HOAs were still relatively new in America, there was a general discontent with how municipal governments were performing, and so certain stakeholders in the real estate industry decided that Associations could do a better job, and set out to sell that concept to millions of American home buyers.

Except that in South Carolina, homeowner associations did not do a good job of maintaining their dams. And the state’s regulatory agency, DHEC (Dept. of Health & Environmental Control), did not do a good job of regularly inspecting privately owned dams, nor following up on repair recommendations. In fact, SC barely even funded the DHEC, making it next to impossible for timely inspections of dams.

So the federal government and state government are more than happy to take tax revenues – property, sales, and income tax – to create all these agencies, including FEMA and DHEC. And local governments in particular seem more than happy to push privatization of essential services, giving Americans fewer and fewer non-HOA choices.

But then government agencies don’t do what they are supposed to do, and expect “private” HOAs to figure it out for themselves when disaster strikes. And that is definitely not disclosed to buyers or current owners.

News flash: That’s what privatization is all about!

Just for your reference, it seems that there is nothing to stop a homeowner, condo, or cooperative association from applying for a Small Business Administration loan, as an alternative source of FEMA assistance, albeit the kind of assistance that has to be paid back.

Apparently CAI wants Associations to be regarded as a mini-government in this instance. In this case, they want government interference in the form of FEMA grants and emergency assistance to repair common elements in condominiums and cooperatives, and also with debris removal for all homeowner associations.

So I suppose that if FEMA decides that HOAs are “governmental in nature,” and deserving of Public Assistance, then we should soon see major changes in governance policy. Surely, the federal government will require all Association-Governed Residential Communities to provide meetings and official documents that are open to the general public. Free Speech, Due Process, and all the rest of our Constitutional rights will apply, as they do in schools, universities, public housing, and medical facilities.

Bring it on!

Nevada Trash!

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There’s no other word to describe it. As the husband of a severely handicapped woman, I seethe with anger whenever I see abuse of the elderly, or abuse of the handicapped.

A lawsuit has just been filed in Las Vegas, Nevada by two handicapped elderly women, both military veterans, who are being hounded out of their HOA because they bought a van to accommodate their respective disabilities.

Illegal Handicap Van

Board members of the Spanish Steps Lakeside – Park View Estates Homeowners Association have decided the van used by the women is an illegal commercial vehicle despite the fact that it has handicap placards. The women have endured two years of threats, fines, liens and lawsuits.

Is the Americans with Disabilities Act not written in clear enough language for HOA bullies to understand? I guess once you’re elected as a gorilla on the HOA board, your DNA actually undergoes changes. At any rate, the lawsuit linked below is worth reading.

(link to new handicap access lawsuit in Las Vegas)

Amateur Radio Saves Lives, HOAs Don’t!

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Why does the America Homeowners Association movement hate amateur radio operators with such vehemence? They are banned in every community in every state. HOAs used to ban traditional satellite antennas until Congress stepped on these Nazi neighborhoods. Now there are satellite dishes everywhere and they haven’t hurt property values. It’s now time for Congress to protect amateur radio operators.

Linked below is an excellent YouTube video that explains the reasons for the new proposed legislation before Congress.

HOA Radar Guns Aimed At YOU!

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Regular readers of this blog know how I despise the idea of putting police radar guns in the hands of average citizens. I dislike them for a number of reasons, technological and legal.

I actually ‘possessed’ a radar gun for a short time back in 1977. It was ‘loaned’ to me by a friend in the Denver Police traffic division who promptly forgot that the ‘loan’ was for only a weekend. I ended up keeping it for eight weeks. My friend was curious about some weird readings he kept getting from the radar gun even when it was properly tuned and he wondered if I could enlist some electronics experts to sort it all out

In that same year Martin Marietta, the space rocket and satellite giant, had just built a four lane highway from its massive plant in southern Jefferson County all the way to the outskirts of South Denver. Nobody worked at Martin on Sundays so I had that four lane highway all to myself.

Each Sunday morning I would meet my attorney, some experienced electronics engineers from my TV station, and an engineer from one of my rival stations across town. We assembled a variety of cars, vans and trucks with the idea of videotaping the radar gun in action as we aimed it down the road.

The radar gun is actually very simple technology. You just aim it down the road and watch the digital speed readings on a small screen. When it tells you that a car down the road is speeding you just squeeze the trigger and it freezes the digital readout. The vehicle owner is then pulled over and given a ticket.

RADAR is a palindrome: It reads the same backwards and forwards, and the cops love to say “It gets you coming and going.” And that’s true, but what’s never explained is that many traffic cops don’t have a clue how these things work. After eight weeks with a half dozen engineers on a deserted highway, I know exactly how they work.

The radar, which stands for ‘radio detection and ranging,’ throws out a narrow-frequency radio wave that looks like a fat tear-drop shaped bubble down the highway. The radio wave bounces off the most reflective target in its field of view and the now-modulated wave returns to the radar gun. Understand that I said the most reflective target!

If the traffic cops sees a bright red Corvette coming down the road and the radar says he’s going 15 MPH over the limit, the Vette owner gets a ticket. Of course everyone knows that Corvette owners have lead feet.

But time after time on that lonely country highway we ran Corvettes at various speeds and various traffic configurations. We’d run the Corvette in front of a 9News microwave van and the radar gun almost always picked up on the van! A big van could be speeding up to a quarter mile behind the legally driven corvette and the speedgun pointed directly at the Corvette would come back with the speed the van was going.

Conversely, a speeding Corvette would often come back with a reading that bounced off the slow moving van. It’s because the radio signal bounces away from the sleek Corvette. But the flat front of the big truck reflects much more of the radio signal back to the traffic cop.

In other words, in many traffic configurations handing out proper speeding citations was not much more than a crap shoot.

My week-long TV series was highly controversial but won awards and the same experiment was duplicated by other TV News stations across the country.

All that being said, many police departments are now using laser speedguns which I highly respect. At least the officer gets a readout of the vehicle with the laser dot on its bumper.

Now, onto the HOA story. The police department in Canon City, Colorado has agreed to lend radar speedguns to volunteers from the Dawson Ranch Homeowners Association to check up on the speed their neighbors are going.

The terrifying ‘next step’ could be what some HOAs in Illinois are already allowed to do. They can physically arrest speeders. They can track speeding Home Depot trucks and assess fines against whatever homeowner was getting a delivery.

Putting police powers into the hands of famously incompetent and corrupt HOA board members is inexcusable.

(Canon City Police to put Radar Guns in Hands of HOAs)

Madness In HOA Arizona

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guest blog by Jill Schweitzer

I’ve been taking HOA classes put on by the City for the last few years. I used to attend to learn, now I attend to see what I missed the first time around, what the HOA industry omits in the discussions, what blunders I am able to witness.

Recently I attended a class where the HOA attorney was discussing how he is representing an HOA which is suing an owner because he put an extra block on his block wall. He told us how the lawsuit has been a pending for a couple years and his fees are now up to approximately 22k.

The attorney then went on to say how he was basically looking forward to winning the lawsuit, putting a lien on the house and then taking the house.

I do not understand how Boards allow homeowners to be treated this way. That attorney’s attitude is horrible. No one should lose their home because they made their fence a little too high. No one should arrogantly state they are going to take someone’s home. There is too much power in HOAs, and in the actions of those in the industry.

This behavior simply wouldn’t happen if Boards smarten up…and if the laws were changed to protect owners. I highly doubt that an extra row of block impacted property values in that community.

One more note, attendees in class fill out a survey and make suggestions for future classes. The person who coordinates the classes then sends an email to all attendees with the results. I made two suggestions that were omitted from the email:

1. Have a class taught by an attorney who is not a part of the industry lobby groups.
2. Have a class taught by a particular attorney in Scottsdale who is offering arbitration at a much lower cost to owners. He is not a part of the industry lobby groups.

The powers-that-be must have decided those two suggestions were too outrageous. Or quite possibly there is some control over the content provided to homeowners and board members who attend classes. My goal is to have a class taught by non-lobby group attorneys in the near future regardless of whether the City sponsors the class.