Non-Active Homeowners Association-Using money from HOA account

My development used to have a practicing association, but they have not had a meeting since July, 2005. The homeowners are not interested, but there were dues collected up to that point. These funds are in an association account. My question is what will I be able to do as a homeowner if money is taken out of the account when there was no decision as a homeowners association to proceed in using the funds. What can I do?

If nobody is interested, I would suggest trying to gather momentum to dissolve the HOA. I would especially do this if it was previously a mandatory HOA. Consider what could happen otherwise:

A motivated person could setup a meeting and collect 20% of the needed proxies to hold such a meeting. He/she may tell the owners anything to get a signature on a proxy they don't care about.

Now said person will most likely be elected to the board with a couple of like minded people. Now what agenda do they have????

Suddenly you could start receiving violation notices in the mail. And the policy might be changed to attach a fine from the get go. The thing is that 30% (or whatever makes for quorum) legally elected this few people. Further, they have the association name, authority and best of all account on their side. While next year you can possibly get enough upset people to elect a new board, you now have a mess on your hands. Especially if the act of owing a fine can make the home ineligible to vote. Add in a few who appreciate the efforts to clean up the neighborhood and you gave a royal size mess.

Thank you for your help. I will have to find out if we are mandatory or voluntary. When the account was set up, there were two signatures needed to withdraw money from the account. There were three signatures on file (President, Vice President and Treasurer). One person only came to me to say they wanted to have a block party which I told them I had no problem with it. I only overheard that they want to use our homeowners account to fund it. Our homeowners association has 15 homeowners in our development. There are no bills that we are responsible for. We had a board of directors in 2005, but we were required to have elections yearly and there was none for 2006, 2007 or 2008. It is over $2,000 in the account. I was on the board during 2005 and that is the amount that was there then.

MaryA,
Try to float your last paragraph by most (to my knowledge, all) HOA or condo or whatever and watch if sink swiftly to the bottom and get carried away by the current.

I absolutly agree with you 100 percent and feel the trial of living in an association would go much smoother if all believe this.

Also, this points out I think it was Raxanne that was asked for association money to have a party. A much abused and misunderstood common occurance. We all seem to grasp, that money is not our money and should not be considered so, but we tend to ignore, absolutely none of that money can be spent unless it benefits the real property. No matter how small that real propert is, each owner has a share and until you can get more creative than present, you can not spend a penny on parties. You don't have a fellowship budget or a "happy" budget, or even a "Money spent by the majority budget." Also the board, suffering under the same restriction as other owners don't and can't fund a Get together party. Could you allocate money to dissovle the association and mybe throw a little shin Dig to promote the sale, I imagine you could, if you had 100% writtem support, 99% would not do it.

But.........who cares?

Roxane,

OK, so the HOA is mandatory. You state there has been no activity for 3 years. Does that mean you have no common areas or other amenities to maintain? If so, why even have an HOA? Perhaps the members should be thinking about dissolution.

The exact method to dissolve your HOA should be in the governing documents. This usually requires 100% of the homeowners to vote yes and a filing with the County Clerk. Since you state that there are no common areas to maintain you do not have to worry about disposing of them. The money may have to be divided and returned to the homeowners that paid it.

What is the "purpose" of the corporation, listed on the corporate papers? Seems funny that the IRS would grant you a not for profit status for just a social club that provides no unique services. Sure that you saw "corporation" papers? Somewhere in the bylaws or other papers it should list what your mission is.

P.S. Be sure to take minutes of these last official acts of the corp. and let the IRS and state know that you are now inactive status.