Jun 16: Choosing Who Gets to Speak

Board bias was on full display at the June 16th board meeting, and it would be disingenuous of this website to pretend otherwise.

If we want people to fully show up, to bring their whole selves including their unarmored, whole hearts—so that we can innovate, solve problems, and serve people—we have to be vigilant about creating a culture in which people feel safe, seen, heard, and respected.

-Brene Brown

Community Comment

During community comment, one member presented her written comment - half of which was not added to the record despite being submitted two days before. We have provided the full comment here.

The board then asked that comments be emailed.

The Agenda Documentation Gap

At least one research item appeared on the agenda without supporting documentation or a link to underlying materials. This makes it impossible for members to contribute meaningfully before a vote.

The Security Report

Usually a quick report, summer weather has resulted in more activity. During the report, the home of a member was discussed. This member raised their hand, possibly to address a statement made during the report, but the president did not recognize her. She left.

The HOA board is the smallest level of governance; the layer closest to us. If we won’t listen to and make space for each other, who will?

Members do not know what board members will say during a meeting, which direction the meeting will go. If a member is asking to be recognized, it is because they can contribute, but had not way of doing so before the topic was explored.

Board members have also admitted that they don’t know how a topic is going to develop. Which means, they don’t know what they’re missing or how important that information is.

The policy is hurting our members and driving them away from engagement.

The security report also omitted a verbal assault from one neighbor towards another, which was reported contemporaneously. The reported assaulter is connected with the board and is protected by this silence. 

We discuss people who speed, aggressive dogs, and teens fishing. Why was this not included?

The Management Company Question

The board did not present their comparison of management companies at this meeting, though you can access it through the May agenda. The board noted that the comparisons are difficult due to the range of rates and features.

Follow up calls would help with this: how many admin hours do we actually use in a month, and what are Spectrum’s management rates?

We are continuing with VIS after a review of the compliance letter. VIS missed a tax payment on our Urban Forest property, and the omission was corrected last year. The treasurer is also requesting better accounting from VIS that will support the finance committee.

The Floor Access Comparison

Later in the meeting, a board member arranged for an outside party to speak in support of a proposed newsletter advertising arrangement. That discussion included back-and-forth, questions, and visible engagement from the board.

When a previously submitted resident proposal — a website redesign — came up on the agenda shortly after, the resident who submitted it asked to speak to it and was told no, that comment would be reserved for the end of the meeting, per standard practice. With no other channel available to object — chat closed, unmuting not permitted — the resident held up a handwritten sign to the camera noting that the outside party had just been allowed to speak.

The board subsequently acknowledged that allowing the original party to speak had been a mistake. No part of that discussion was struck or revisited. The proposal under discussion was also misattributed to a different community member; it was the submitting resident's proposal, not the person it was attributed to.

What this means going forward: The same meeting produced two different standards for floor access within the same agenda segment — one in which outside input was welcomed and discussed at length, and one in which a resident's own proposal could not be spoken to by the person who wrote it. 

The Recurring Conflict-of-Interest Pattern

The board confirmed that executive discussion will cover the common areas manager's contract. The board member married to the common areas manager was present for this confirmation. This is not the first time this specific relationship has intersected with board discussion of that contract; members have raised the underlying recusal question in prior meetings without a clear answer about what process, if any, governs it.

Separately, the common areas manager — a paid contractor — was able to engage in real-time discussion with the board during the meeting, prompted directly by board members. Volunteers proposing work on the board's behalf, including the website and bylaws committees, have not received equivalent floor access or responsiveness for proposals the board itself requested.

What this means going forward: If the board wants volunteer labor, the baseline cost of that ask is treating volunteer proposals with the same real-time engagement extended to paid contractors. Asking for the work and then declining to make time for it is not a neutral choice — it sets the actual price of volunteering higher than most people will be willing to pay, and the board should expect that cost to show up later as fewer volunteers willing to do the work at all.

The Executive Session Incident

As the board moved into executive session for 30 minutes, a member unmuted to chat as would be available in an in-person meeting. In previous chats, we recruited for the bylaws committee and identified a gap in noticing that happened because the website is not functioning well. 

A board member - not the president - briefly reopened the meeting to raise an unverified complaint that the resident above had been participating in ‘board bashing’. The board has not confirmed that the characterization was accurate. The resident's microphone was muted before she could respond. She held up a sign reading "I said hi." Her camera was then disabled.

What this means going forward: An accusation was made in a setting where the person it concerned had no ability to respond — first by procedure (the chat had already been closed earlier in the meeting), then directly (mic muted, then camera disabled). Whatever the substance of the underlying complaint, the sequence itself — accusation, followed by removal of every available channel to respond — is the same pattern described earlier regarding floor access, targeted at the same member.

End-of-Meeting Comments

At the end of the meeting, two members raised hands to offer community comments, with one indicating in advance that more than one comment would be coming. The second raised hand was not recognized.

The member who had been falsely accused stood up for herself. This meeting was a perfect example of everything she had stated in the opening comment - control of who could speak, control of every channel, control of validity. The member stated that she had approached the board outside of meetings to achieve resolution and had repeatedly been told ‘no.’ She stated that the board had never asked for her account before accusing her.

The available comment time was used in part to correct a characterization of the website proposal as requesting features — such as integrated chat or social media tools — that were never actually proposed. This is a strawman fallacy. 

Why was a strawman applied instead of allowing the committee lead to speak to her proposal? When she raised her hand, why couldn't she correct the strawman?

A structural note worth naming directly: the absence of complaints about a system is not the same as evidence the system works. People generally don't file complaints about friction they don't know is avoidable — they need a comparison point to recognize that something could be better. A "no complaints" standard will systematically miss exactly the kind of problem being described here, regardless of how real that problem is.

What We're Losing

By the end of this meeting, the resident discussed above had no chat, no ability to unmute, a hand that went unrecognized, and a disabled camera. Every available channel for a member to participate or respond, in sequence, stopped working for one person over the course of a single meeting.

This matters beyond the individuals involved. An HOA board is not a social club; it is the smallest layer of local government most residents will ever interact with directly. Its legitimacy rests on members being able to bring information, disagreement, and lived experience into the room where decisions get made — not because doing so guarantees harmony, but because it's the only mechanism available for a volunteer board to make better decisions than seven people working from their own assumptions.

Tonight, that mechanism failed twice in ways worth naming plainly. A resident with direct, relevant professional background — training in user interface design, experience driving real-world engagement through digital communication as a former communications director — was not given the floor to inform a decision the board made anyway, on weaker evidence than was available in the room. Another resident was refused access to a discussion about themselves.

A board that wants member participation has to reckon with what an unrecognized hand can cost. We lost a lifetime of experience, someone who was engaged civically in our success.

None of this requires assigning bad intent to anyone in the room. It requires only that the current pattern continue uncorrected for the cost to keep compounding: less information reaching the board, fewer members willing to do the work of raising it, and a community that has functionally shut down any channel for the kind of disagreement that's supposed to make local governance work.

Questions This Meeting Raises

• What process, if any, governs recusal when a board member's spouse holds a contract under board discussion?

• Does LCC have a documentation standard for agenda items, or should one be adopted?

• How do members appeal assumptions made about them when those assumptions, not shared by the board, inform board action?

• Will the board apply the same floor-access standard to everyone?