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.