You need to bring up at the annual that someone else needs to be the election official. Having family members is a conflict of interest. I think it would be good if you volunteered.

They also should not be allowed to change the voting to differ from the by-laws. In our community we need 67% vote of the community to change by-laws. I would check your by-laws. You may also want to have a candid conversation with your property manager about this.

my property manager says he refuses to speak to me or accept faxes from me, and he sent me a certified letter stating i should not contact him anymore,even via fax, AG time. plus he refused again to provide the shareholders and BOD contact info. 2 years ago concerning a number of self dealings by the BOD pres and vice presd\son in law and mother in law/
plus homophobic hate speech the the vice president used when talking about the recently resigned long term treasurer. he resigned because dealing with these people was impossible, now i know why the second crop of people that moved into the building left, They were most likely abused by these people with the managing company backing them our b y -laws are like yours,. over 3/4 plus an separate notice had to be enclosed in the envelope if during the annual meeting.
i asked those questions last night, the e president said he has no idea what i am talking about, doesn't care about the propriety lease , stated he refused to provide the BOD contact info,since they don’t want it out, most likely he doesn't want it out. he wants to see everything first and think about how he can spin it.
he said he will only list their names and apt #. One person never moved in, his son moved in, the father never lived or moved in here. I believe in exchange for buying 2 apartments at once,at opposite ends of building, he improperly was given a spot on the board, that may have been held for a convenient resignation, so they could put him in as payback for investing ,which is not allowed. I also want to check on who the real estate agent was for all these non owner occupied sales, where the person at the interview said they were moving in, only them., the president hasn't lived here in over 5 year, and i brought up that him and his wide, who both no longer live here have 80to 90% of the storage room filled with their stuff , yet the wife has a house or condo if Florida and pres a house in long island. a 10 year shareholder asked 3 years back to make room for other people he was rebuffed by the pres, i brought this up and told him he is self dealing, and get his stuff out. i wasn't playing anymore, he said he had no idea what self dealing was and didn't care, The managing agent lies and provides fraudulent info on all questions, i asked last year. i asked about the audit report stating that monies sometimes reached over the FDIC limit. i asked about that , they said no it didn't pres and MA, i called the auditor and he confirmed that on some occasion the monies does go over the 250,000k. 310 one day, 290k and so on, but when i asked last year nothing but lies. i also personally brought up the par 14 of prop lease and gave a copy of the case law from the NY law journal concerning the "and" or"or" clause/wording . the MA said our prop lease said OR, i said no our states AND, the president said he didn't care, he was ridiculing me for asking the questions, i pointed out that was the same technique Bernie Madoff used, and it wont 't work on me.
he ridiculed me saying that the rest if the meeting no one knew what i was talking about, and i said i don't care and if they don't know about proprietary lease and by-laws since being here10 - 20 years, they are the ones that don't have a clue. and they will be victims. Our by laws which i had and the proprietary lease. the by-laws don't go into voting a lot but it is very simple every shareholder will have one vote per share. For the first 10 to15 years we were told we could combine them , break them up, vote them all for one person, split it evenly as long as the total came out to the number of shares that we had.

Now they have written on the ballot that we cannot combine them , that we had to vote. lets say i have 300shares, and 2 people are running, i have to vote 300 shares for each person. which is not one vote per share. Plus the original voting was wonderful when he got his players in, and as soon as he noticed a unrest ,came up with all kinds of manipulations of the voting process. Last night his son was over by the ballot table and seemed to be holding a lot of proxy’s . His son is not a shareholder. someone questioned what he was doing and he said he had a proxy for a neighbor, legally he can do that, submit the proxy. bit he cannot speak at the meeting nor count votes, and i think he may have attended the whole meeting, he was behind me, but i am not sure if he is even allowed in until the proxy are collected.

Hi Escapefromyonkers,

Your place does sound like it has its fair share of problems. I had some trouble following what all the issues are, but I will try my best.

Regarding the shareholders and BOD contact info, what is your intent to have this information? What kind of contact information are you looking for? Other than names and unit #’s I don’t think anything else would be appropriate to give out. We don’t give out the phone numbers, e-mails addresses etc. of BOD members. That just asks for trouble. The BOD members volunteer their time. Any issues need to be sent to the management company who the co-op pays to solve issues for the co-op. Any issues that require BOD attention are brought up at the monthly board meetings. However, as Board President, I do give out my e-mail address to everyone so they can ask me questions, but I do that as a courtesy.

I think you need to run for the board. You can need to be friendly with everyone. Don’t disparage anyone on the board, even if they deserve it and you are 100% correct. It will just make you look crazy. You want to look cool and collect and just run on the fact you have some ideas and skills that would compliment the existing board of directors.

Once you are, you can clean house. You need to communicate all the rules and expectations in quarterly Newsletters. This will keep the community informed on what is going on. We just digitized our Proprietary Lease and House Rules, so folks can keep copies on their computer for easy reference.

Stay strong and calm and run for the Board. That is the only way to change things. Our community had a lot of corruption from our previous president. He would collect proxies to ensure we stayed in power. He used is position to manipulate our previous Superintendent into making him into his personal worker for a contact company. We had 11 days straight where the Super did nothing on the property while we paid him and then we found out he was doing side work with the president off the property. Once I got on, I started releasing Newsletters and documenting everything. That was the only way to solve this issue. With a better informed community, we had a landslide election the next year where the community voted off all the corrupt board members. Since then, our long time residents say we now have the best board ever. Delayed projects are starting to move forward and we release quarterly Newsletter and have quarterly open shareholder meetings to ensure everyone is informed.

Don’t give up. It took over a year for me to get things changed here. You need to be persistent and you will prevail.

FW Board: If the president is rigging the ballots, then the (rather rambling) person reporting all these improprieties stands no chance of being elected to the board, so that's probably not an option.

Other than moving out, he might want to contact other aggrieved individuals, chip in together for an attorney, and as a group send documented instances of self-dealing to the AG.

If I were he, I might also think about publicizing this evidently corrupt board president. NY1, the Daily News and the New York Post, for instance, often cover co-op/condo corruption.

Our former president was collecting proxies to rig the election. Once we educated enough people on what was going on, we were able to have them personally hand in the proxies so the candidates they truly wanted to vote for could elected.

If his president can't be beat, then I agree that getting an attorney with the help of the AG and NY1, the Daily News and the New York Post may be his best bet. I hope the person living there is able to make the best decision on what to do. Knowing what we used to go through at our place I truly feel for this individual.

While much good advice has been posted on this thread, I wince every time someone says "call the AG."

I'd never discourage anyone from trying this route, but would give long odds that it won't happen. As of today, it's just not something they do.

That's why owners with such concerns should: a) join ACCO; b) ask their state senator & assemblymember to vote for the Ombudsman Bill, which can be found here:

http://condocoopowners.org/ombudsman-bill-s-395/

The Ombudsman Office will be dedicated to PRACTICAL ENFORCEMENT, & to giving authoritative answers & advice to owners & board members alike.

Your community is the perfect example of why we need an ombudsman bill S00395. We need a government agency that we will be able to turn to when all else fails, as it has for you and your neighbors. You must contact your elected officials, meet with them and explain why they need to vote for this bill. Also, start a grassroots effort of neighbors and owners in other communities with similar problems. We need this legislation. If we just complain, we will get nowhere. If we band together and demand political action, perhaps we can get our message out to those who can help us. This board is an important forum, let us use it to get some bills passed that will help all of us. Another is city council intro 188 having to do with transparency in co op screening. do a google search of both these bills and get started working to get them passed.
Dianne Stromfeld, director,
Alliance of Coop and Condo Owners
( ACCO)

Thanks Dianne
is this bill on NY state senator level or how far has it gone and who should be contacted. Where would a copy of the Bill be located on the net

go to NYS.gov and search under Senator Liz Krueger. You will need to contact your local state senator. Start a grassroots effort of letter writing to push our elected officials to take a long hard look at the need for this bill.
Good luck