Friday, February 23, 2007

The LATEST Savo Island Co-operative Homes Board of Directors bylaw infraction....

Well, The Savo Island Board of Directors, controlled by a group I usually refer to as "The Alliance", has violated yet another Savo bylaw -- and just missed violating one more by the skin of their teeth. So. At what point in time do I just shrug my shoulders and stop keeping track?

Obviously not yet!

Our bylaws require that Savo Island hold its annual meeting and Board election annually and there is no way of getting around that (although "The Alliance" did manage one time to stall an annual meeting off for three whole years.) In any case, a date was reluctantly set -- March 3, 2007. So far so good. But our bylaws also require that the annual meeting agenda be sent out to all residents 10 days in advance of the meeting itself. February 21, 2007 was the last possible day!

At 3:00 pm on February 21, there still was no sign of an agenda. So in desperation, I knocked on our Board secretary's door to tell him that according to our bylaws the agenda HAD to be out that very day. He replied that he had gotten an e-mail to that effect from our management company but had thought that the meeting announcement he had sent out a week ago had covered the agenda requirement too. Not!

As I was pretty much going ballistic on his front doorstep, our Board secretary finally did concede that yes the bylaws DID call for an official agenda to be given to the residents ten days before an annual meeting. Whew!

I then gave the Secretary a written verbatim copy of what the bylaws say MUST be on the annual meeting agenda and he then said he would send out the agenda on time -- which he did.

However, when I got the secretary's agenda, there had been some tampering. The bylaws state that the actual, required agenda MUST include the following item: "Election of inspectors of election". But the secretary had conveniently changed this item to read, "Appointment by President of election officers". WHAT!

That's blatantly messing with the bylaws! Again! Arrgh!

And why in the world would they want their own hand-picked person to be in charge of counting the votes? What with the President and two other Alliance members up for re-election, one would think they would want an impartial supervisor to make sure that the election was fair.

PS: Regarding our current Board officers' sudden spiteful obsession with getting rid of a well-constructed and property-value-enhancing window that I had installed in my unit in 2003 and which had already been documented as being a necessary "reasonable medical accommodation," I recently asked the Board to reconsider their sudden hard-line stance again. Good grief! You would think that I had asked them to spit on the flag!

Anyway, the window issue will still be a sore spot with me unless the Board can prove to me that they are not discriminating against me because of my whistle-blower status -- which they cannot. So I trundled off to see my doctor again this week to get another medical accommodation letter and he gave me one stating that I "would benefit from living in a well-lit environment with adequate daylight lighting".

That freaking window has been keeping me from getting Seasonal Affective Disorder for the last four years! Now if only that freaking window could keep me from getting "Savo Island Board of Directors Affective Disorder" too, I'd be eternally grateful!