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This started regarding an interior fence in Arlington that is completely useless - and yet every single option do anything to the fence - major or even minor (just move a fence a few feet in or out) was completely rejected by the Board with extremely silly reasons.
Clearly one could understand objections but there is no logical reasoning with these folks - the clique and the Board that run Russell Place.
It ends up a pretty funny story and shows the absurd logic of the Board in defending their "No" answers regarding any change to the wooden fence.
The web is filled with the stories about crazy things that Condo Board of Trustees do. Most stories are nightmares such as the Home Sweet Hell news report and an entire blog devoted to Condos Nightmares And Other Enigmas. (Links at the main article Absurd logic of Russell Place Condos Board
Turns out that absurd logic of the Board was just the starting point. They have forcefully acted to protect their clique and they go about breaking even explicit Rules and Regulations of Russell Place with impunity and selectively enforce other rules with fines and charges and orders to fall in line.
The last straw came when they went to the extreme to protect Unit #21 - who managed to wrangle a coveted extra parking spot from the builder a while ago. While that is all technically legal, it was all done without a public notice. Still, one would assume that since parking spots are common areas, the Board would publish an updated parking chart of who is allowed to park where. The Board categorically refused to do this! Amazing! This Board keeps more secrets from their own members than does the Town of Arlington.
The 2011/2012 cast of characters in the Russell Place Board of Trustees:
Unit# 17 Sandra Lagrega
Unit# 4 Dianne Schaefer
Unit# 34 Millie Regan
Unit# 1 Andy Ananthakrishnan
Unit# 25 Carole Symonds
These are the people who declared an interior fence to be so sacred that nothing could be done to it and they also decreed that common areas parking lot information must remain secret.
2010-2011 -- when a useless interior fence is declared untouchable!
While it was completely acceptable that my first proposal was rejected for whatever reasons, even after continued updates to proposals and new proposals taking feedback into account, all were rejected.
In November 2011, I tried to solicit opinions regarding all unit owner's thoughts about this proposal. Given that the annual meetings are never fully attended, and since the Deed requires 51% and 75% ownership thresholds to agree to any changes, I sent individual letters to every resident with a Yes/No question on whether to consider any changes, and got help in completing the opinion poll survey.
Here are the results:
8 said No (includes 2 very rude individuals who did not care to say no or yes),
6 said Yes,
1-2 No Response, but were maybe Yes based on past discussions,
22 Unknown, and could not be contacted over multiple attempts.
So getting the minimum 18-24 Yes votes necessary to meet the lower threshold 51% is going be impossible to meet.
Which means that the Board and its clique essentially rules this place, there is no way a change can be made unless it is something they want.
More details on the web: search for "russell place arlington board" or go directly to Absurd Logic of the Russell Place Condos Board in Arlington, MA
A while ago, I had asked the Board to provide an updated map of the parking spots in Russell Place.
All parking spots are common areas. And the builder provided the parking assignments to everyone when the units went on sale years ago. After all, it is useful for all owners to know who owns what spot.
The builder also gave some select, preferred, in-the-know owners extra parking spots. No public notice was sent of this transfer from common area to specific units - it was all done in a manner unknown. This was legal - builder had the right to sell spots.
But how was it done? In secret? The Board when asked, refused to provide any information on who bought the extra spots.
So let us look at this - common area lot was parceled off to a few select owners, but no one else is allowed to know about that? On the other hand, the Board does want to know of any change to a Unit that increases its value, so they want to know about renovations. But they are now suddenly willing to allow extra parking spots owned by an unit to remain secret?
However partial or illegal that sounds, let us grant that to the Board. We don't need to know who paid what, that was in the past anyway.
Since parking lots are common areas, how about today 8 years later - can we not get information about who is assigned what spot? Parking is a big issue in this complex, and there have many altercations between owners regarding parking. Many units have a single parking spots, some have two.
On 2011-Nov-21 I received a reply that the Board will not provide the information about who has which parking spot. "Their legal council decided that Board is not obligated to provide this information."
So naturally, the Board was all happy about this - and while they could have said "this is a common area, everyone here needs to know who owns what spot" but of course they did not. They want to keep all this all secret.
What is amazing is that in a meeting a few years ago there was a point made that we need to let everyone know who owns what parking spot. This would help avoid fights regarding parking, and neighbours could contact neighbours directly before taking any drastic action. All of this makes sense. So the Board of course could not in their usual twisted behaviors, do this! They just slacked off and did nothing about it. And now it is clear they benefited from keeping that information secret - it helps keep embarrassing questions away. Now Unit#21 (M Copithorne) is protected - they must have received some suspiciously good deal from the builder to get the extra parking spot that no one else was told about, and can never to be told about!
Here's the original parking assignment: 2003 Parking Assignment
Most units have the same spots today. Some lucky owners, who are to remain
secret according to this Board, managed to buy some more spots.
For example, because of the secrecy, we can't know if Unit#21 who should
be only using spot #30 but also uses
another spot #9, owns both spots or if there is some other explanation.
The Town of Arlington provides more information about the people living here than this Russell Place Board is willing to give. This for example is the Unit 21 Property Tax Assessment which clearly shows no mention of purchase of extra parking spot. That is perfectly legal of course, since parking spots are common areas. But - since Unit 21 is going to get more money when they sell their condo, the next owner will then end up paying more in taxes. In addition to this, current owners of similar units can compare their taxes to Unit #21. I looked at just one sample and this is amazing - one other Unit is over-assessed at least $30,000 to $50,000! Great deal for Unit #21 and the Board clique of course needs to keep this a secret!
Property tax issues in general are described here, which is primarily an explanation of how it works in MA: General Info on Property Tax Abatement. For the Town of Arlington, all house values (for taxation purposes) are publicly available. Enter an address such as "21 Russell Place" and click on the "Search" button at the town site to get complete assessment information below: http://arlingtonma.us/property/select.pl
The assessment pages include the original prices paid in 2002 or 2003 for the units and any sales after that.
Every increase in the value of an unit such as by making renovations, extensions, appropriating additional parking spots, are items that increase the assessment. So a unit that is not being assessed on such increases is underpaying their share.
Legally, underpayment may not be important (in some cases). But the town rules
say that similar houses should pay similar taxes. So other units that
are exactly the same and assessed much higher can use the comparative
assessments to get their tax reduced by correcting their assessments.
Photos will be posted here to track when they do this in the future. They have done this in the past, and not worth posting those photos.
Unit #21 (M Copithorne) with their multiple vehicles is especially consistent in abusing parking rules. Unmarked spots, marked spots belonging to others are all used by them to park their multiple vehicles. Last winter their truck straddled two spots during snow days so the actual owner of the spot was unable to use their parking spot - and Unit #21 repeated this behavior multiple times. They act like they own the place as the previous sections show, so this is not unusual behavior.
Let us see how the Russell Place Board clique behaves going forward.
Some people including esteemed Board members are openly disobeying the rules - heavy items are hanging outside the unit. This is a safety issue - who is going to check that the holes drilled in common area ceilings are safe and the chains hanging heavy pots are sturdy? One unit has a heavy swing in the common area. Hanging pots and swings are liable to cause injuries and thus are insurance problems. So it makes sense the Deed disallows them.
References from the Russell Place Deed:
Declaration of Trust Rule #4:
No display on outside.
No sign, awning, canopy, in the exterior.
Even the Rules Handbook says nothing can be hung.
Deed 11 c - no decals, decorations allowed on exterior of any unit.
Repeats the Decl of Trust Rule 4.
Of course, a few residents of Russell Place, especially some Board members like Lagrega, Schaefer, don't like these rules so they openly ignore them.
Furniture is also not allowed by the Deed. The Board immediately issued a "book of rules" that allows this. So they changed the rule on their own. It is unclear if this was legal. Many of the deed items require 75% of owners to vote on changing it. In this case, that was certainly not done.
Here is the record of rule breaking by Board Members and others: Unit #17 Hanging Pots, Unit #21 Hanging Pots, Units #2 and #4 Hanging Pots and a Swing! have drilled holes in patios - which are common areas. They hacked up common areas to hang heavy pots. The rules explicitly state that nothing can be hung outside an unit. If the fence was so sacred to the Board and could not be touched, how come they are going around drilling holes and hanging things when the rules explicitly say to not do that?
This Board has quickly imposed fines for people who missed a single out-of-order special assessment payment - disregarding the reason for late payment, they said "rules are rules" and bang! Fine imposed.
There was also a past incident where they made an unit member remove a satellite dish antenna - because rules said so.
And now they find nothing wrong when the Board members themselves go around
drilling holes in common areas (Units 4, 17, 21), hanging heavy pots and even a swing, storing
furniture in common areas (Unit 21, and others) - all of which is also
breaking the Russell Place rules?
The Russell Place Deed clearly specifies how the decks would be maintained and paid for. All owners also bought their units with the Deed mentioning how deck repairs would be paid for. The Board of Trustees found this objectionable. So they solicited legal opinion, discovered that the Mass General Law (MGL) allows them to ignore the deed in this case.
And they then had a vote at a annual meeting, where the majority of people at that meeting then voted to ignore the deed. So we now have a situation where no one was standing up for the deed. And asking for a majority vote that takes away the rights of the minorities (only a small number of owners have upper decks) - is the outcome going to be anything but a foregone conclusion?
The Board here deliberately went looking for ways to avoid this rule in the Deed, and then convinced some residents to vote for it. Why have the deed if it is so easy to ignore? And who will stand up for the deed if the board itself wants to work around it? Of course, there is the point that a majority vote is allowed to override the deed - which is true, so looking at it another way, it implies that a few owners can get railroaded by the majority, increasing the monthly bills of the few who did not want the increase, and were expecting the deed to be honored. But it was not really a majority - it was far less than 75% required for deed changes - it was only a majority of the people attending that meeting which is far fewer than a full majority.
Any new owner of the condo complex now will be under the delusion that every section of the deed applies. They will not know that the Board and some owners have already overturned one of its provisions.
Is it unfair for all owners to pay for decks when only some people have them? Why does the Deed even specify that decks are to be fixed by using common funds? One answer could be is that that makes most sense. Just like roofs and sidings, weather is the biggest factor for wear and tear on the decks. So just like roofs and sidings, it makes sense to have it be replaced or fixed from common funds. The MGL exception is also necessary - if one particular owner ends up causing damage to a deck, then the Board needs to have power to override the deed in such exception circumstances. This is a more sensible interpretation of both the Deed and the MGL - and this seems to have escaped the Board members and their chosen lawyers.
Of course, the Board only penalized some deck owners, not all. The
ones who had patios on first floor, some of which are quite large, did not have
to pay for their replacements. Their replacement cost was alloted to all residents! This
is what "fair" means to this Board at Russell Place.
The answer to that is that is not really possible - the cost is prohibitive. Lawyers fees are very high. It costs $300-$800 to just get a initial opinion on a single condo board issue and the total costs could run 5 to 10 times or more over that figure. And that would just cover one issue. On top of this, the person who takes the board to task has to pay fees twice - for his lawyer as well as through the condo fee for defending the condo board!
The point in the end is the character of the Board - are they fair? Are they reasonable? In both these counts the Russell Place Board show themselves to be very partial to themselves and their clique. And all that can be done is to point out their behavior, which they can continue to act on with impunity. A small group can control the whole association, since most people have jobs and don't really have the time or inclination to get involved with Board matters. (Board members seem to be ones with too much free time and retired with no jobs anymore, and so they seem to take perverse pleasure in their antics.)
Some of these issues are the usual difficulties that arise in dense
housing areas, such as cities. And the usual way to resolve them is
is to talk to the neighbour, and resolve it.
Talking to these people has not helped at all. They make polite
noises and things improve for a while but then they immediately revert
back to bad behavior. And once you have a a sufficient handful of people
behaving this way - there are eight "our way or no-way" neighbours here - they
can run roughshod over a 40-unit condo complex. Welcome to Russell Place!
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