HOA United Proposed Legislation – HRLNG Proposed Legislation

I am Patrick Johansen, the founder of HRLNG. The Proposed Legislation her was originally written by Raelene Schifano and I, and then modified by the input of many, many HOA homeowners from across the USA. The Proposed Legislation has been improved greatly by the suggestions and work of many of those you see in HRLNG today.

What I recommend that you do is to read our Proposed Legislation and think about how our Proposed Legislation would protect and benefit YOU and the other HOA Homeowners. If you have questions about the Proposed Legislation please message me, or email me at Patrick@PK80.com, or ask me here and I will personally explain.

Then read the Proposed Legislation of HOA United, which is run by the same person as Condo Connection. His name is Steve Horvath.

Steve basically took our Proposed Legislation, and then, in my opinion, and it appears that many agree, distorted it, and not in a good way. He then searched through laws of other states, and found laws that had some parts of what we would want in the HOA laws. Although I think this is a good technique in general, he is using laws that did not work in others states and presenting them here, leaving in many of the reasons they didn’t work. Taking just the GOOD parts of the laws and using that to show legislators that these laws are already in play in some states is a great idea.

I believe if you look at the types of things CAI fights for, you will see many similarities to the things Steve has in his proposed legislation.

Consider his item 8, the Florida II law that Steve Horvath suggests. ( All caps emphasis is mine)

“A fine may be levied by the board for each day of a 279
continuing violation, with a single notice and opportunity for 280
hearing, except that the fine may not exceed $1,000 in the 281
aggregate UNLESS OTHERWISE PROVIDED IN THE GOVERNING DOCUMENTS. 282
A fine of less than $1,000 may not become a lien against a 283
parcel. In any action to recover a fine, the prevailing party is 284
entitled to reasonable attorney fees and costs from the 285
nonprevailing party as determined by the court.”

Why would we write a law and then allow the governing documents to override the law??? This type of law does not create a single set of laws for everyone but allows the developer AND the new Board of an association to override the laws, creating thousands of varying combinations of laws, different for each HOA and basically negates the law. So although to someone reading this quickly, it might LOOK like this law is benefiting the members, in practice, is it really? No it is not.

You will see this type of verbiage all through Steve’s proposed legislation. See again item 8, California link:

ARTICLE 4. Restrictions on Transfer [4600 – 4620] ( Article 4 added by Stats. 2012, Ch. 180, Sec. 2. )

4600. (a) UNLESS THE GOVERNING DOCUMENTS SPECIFY DIFFERENT PERCENTAGE, the affirmative vote of members owning at least 67 percent of the separate interests in the common interest development shall be required before the board may grant exclusive use of any portion of the common area to a member.

Steve recommends that all states adopt UCIOA, but does not discuss that although UCIOA has some good laws, on the whole it is terrible laws for the homeowner. It could be used as basis but needs a lot of work. Some parts of UCIOA are so badly written they are almost impossible to understand.

Steve’s summary does not match what his law references actually say.

Steve’s #18 Claims “Small claims court for amounts up to the jurisdictional small claims.” Yet the California law he proposes allows foreclosure for anything over $1800. We don’t understand how anyone can feel it is reasonable to take someones home for any debt under $10,000. There are many other ways to collect money rather than foreclosure.

Secondly, this law is only about Foreclosure, not about forcing HOAs to take all debt below the small claims limit into small claims court. It also talks about collecting attorneys fees. Why would there be attorneys fees on either side if the case is taken to small claims court? No attorneys should be allowed to be involved.

Third, I believe the small claims limit for California is $5000 for an corporation filing and $10,000 for an individual filing, so why $1800?

Is Steve’s small claims idea of any value. Well, we feel our HOA Dept, Proposed Legislation is a much better idea. Rather than having some HOA disputes go to mediation, others to arbitration, others to small claims, others to Superior Court, and then all of that allowed to be appealed in Superior Court and higher, why not create one HOA Dept under the Consumer Protection Dept of the Attorney General’s office and have all the issues go through that one department? These officials, due to the fact that they are exclusively working on HOA issues, would know the HOA laws. Do the Small Claims judges or the Superior Court judges know HOA laws? Unlikely.

The HOA Dept would operate somewhat similar to a small claims court. The goal would be to do the fair thing for both the homeowner and collective homeowners.

In 4605 of the same link, Steve proposes:
(a) A member of an association may bring a civil action for declaratory or equitable relief for a violation of Section 4600 by the association, including, but not limited to, injunctive relief, restitution, or a combination thereof, within one year of the date the cause of action accrues.

WAIT! This is what we dont want! This is how things are now! Few homeowners can afford to take civil action against their HOA. The Board Members are using the collective funds of the HOA and the insurance of the HOA to pay for their attorney fees while the homeowner has to risk his retirement savings to pay for his attorney fees.

So the question is, what is Steve, and therefore Condo Connection and HOA United proposing? Is it the summary, is it one of the linked laws, all the linked laws, pieces of the liked laws, or what?

So if we go to a legislator, and present him with Steves Proposed Legislation, will the legislators even understand what Steve is asking for?  Do you understand what Steve is asking for?

Senator Pedersen told me that he recently sent this Proposed Legislation to CAI for their approval.  He told me he had input from Steve and saw his Proposed Legislation.  He said he thought it was similar to ours.  Clearly it is not.  Having a legislator think we are Proposing similar legislation as Steve is a problem, and a concern I have had since first meeting with Steve and Raelene.  It has certainly clouded our message and confused the situation.  Again, benefitting CAI.   See the markup I made of Senator Pedersen’s proposed bill after he met with Steve,  at https://dev.homeownersfightback.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Email-to-Pedersen-markup-of-his-bill-1.pdf

I am not blaming the problem issues on Steve, I have no idea from his proposed legislation, what he said to Pedersen, if he agreed with Pedersen’s proposed bill or not.

HRLNG presents 18 Proposed Legislative changes that we feel will dramatically improve the HOA laws in all states and probably solve over 90% of the dangers that HOA homeowners currently face.  They are very clear and specific.  All that have read our Proposed Legislation seem to understand what it says due to the simple language. We have not had many disagree. We have accomplished this with about 8000 words.

When Steve first approached HRLNG, he told us no legislator would ever read our Proposed Legislation because it was too many items and too long. I have not read ALL of Steves Proposed Legislation and certainly not counted all the words, but I believe it is 29 Proposed Legislations with well over 100,000 words and we still don’t know what he is actually proposing.

Honestly I met with Steve and Raelene almost a year ago and tried to work with them on this so that we could work together all going in the same direction.   I had previously asked Steve multiple times to send me his ideas on the Proposed Legislation in email so I could read them and mark them up with suggestions, objections and concerns for him to answer. He already had our Proposed Legislation. He continuously refused. I could read them on his site, but they were just partially there, in the weird format as you see them today on his site, and blocked from being downloaded making it very difficult to work on them and analyze them.  I don’t see any good reason for doing that but I can think of a lot of bad reasons. I got my copy because he sent them to a legislator and I asked for a copy under FOIA.

As far as Raelene is concern, I can’t picture after what she has seen and been through that she has decided to work in the same direction as CAI. I really doubt that has happened.  She is still clearly very active in attempting to help HOA homeowners to fight their HOAs.  I have tried to reach her for months, but can not get her to discuss why she seems to be supporting Steve? I would love to pull them both into HRLNG IF I could get us all working in the same direction.

So bottom line, Steve Horvath looks a lot like CAI. Steve outwardly disapproves of CAI and yet, many of my conversations with him and much of his proposed legislation seem much like CAI philosophy.