As Disputes Escalate, So Can the Legal Bills

Beware the homeowners association squabble that escalates. Back-fence grousing over parking restrictions, architectural rules or allegations of cronyism can grow into civil war, and homeowners -- the source of all money in the association -- can end up paying big legal bills, no matter which side wins.

One long-running fight in Montgomery County shows why homeowners who serve as directors of their association had better pay strict attention to the details of good governance. People can be surprisingly dogged about how their dues are spent, how elections are held (even for thankless board-of-director jobs), and about how the rules are made, changed and enforced.

For Jo-Ann Fiscina, a decade-long resident of the Devonshire East Homeowners Association in Rockville, the battle with the board started back in 2005.

She, along with some neighbors, believed that just a few elected board members were inappropriately controlling the entire association, making changes as they pleased, preserving their power by allowing other seats on the board to go unfilled and inappropriately encouraging the reelection of incumbents.

Fiscina said these board members were not allowing community input before making rule changes, such as allowing new windows that were less Colonial-looking than the ones originally installed by the builder.

"If the community wants to do that, that's fine," Fiscina said. "But a board member doing it without notifying the community was against the regulations."

In October 2006, she filed a complaint with Montgomery County's Commission on Common Ownership Communities, which has authority to resolve disputes involving homeowners associations, condominiums and cooperatives. Montgomery County is rare in offering this kind of redress; in other places, such disputes can end up in civil court.

Fiscina had an unusually long list of complaints. She charged that board members were not holding regularly scheduled open meetings. She claimed they approved architectural changes (such as the window styles) by voting on the changes only after the work had been done.

She also challenged the way proxy votes were handled in a 2006 board election that resulted in the reelection of an incumbent instead of his lone challenger. The proxies transferred a member's right to vote but didn't say for whom they wished to vote.

"The board members would go and collect proxies, and they would vote for who they wanted," she said in an interview.

Fiscina stressed that she's not opposed to change per se. "My main objection was how they went about doing it."

Hers was a particularly complicated case, said Peter Drymalski, a commission staff member. Most complaints aren't involved enough to warrant a lawyer, as Fiscina's did, he said. The commission held 11 hearings on this one complaint, including two all-day Saturday sessions.