“In the case I’m familiar with, any change in the Bylaws requires a supermajority vote of three-fourths of the unit owners.”
Must be nice. In the HOA I was in, a majority vote of the BOD would create binding rules on the HOA. On a 2-1 vote by the BOD, a paint scheme requirement was added to the rules.
I suspect the HOA in the article ran into problems from playing favorites. That was another problem in our HOA. If you were friends with the BOD, you could do no wrong. If they didn’t like you, you would not get ANY improvement approved, and you would get monthly nastygrams. The HOA complaints against homeowners rarely involved a violation of a written rule. I was one of several homeowners who threatened to sue the HOA for trying to impose fines based on personal whim. And it sounds like the HOA in the article may have tried that as well, although the details are missing.
I should clarify that only a majority of the Board members was required to pass rules and regulations. Similarly, we had a three member Board.
Some things were spelled out pretty clearly in the founding documents of the condo. For example, a unit owner could have one small dog or one cat. It would have been up to the Board to define "small" as applied to a dog.
Our work was somewhat complicated by the fact that the developers were liberals. I'm sure that they pictured their creation as a Utopia for the unit buyers.
The developers fenced in the individual areas behind every unit. This created the perception and the fact that each unit owner had access to his own yard. The problem arises, however, that the founding documents, recorded with the county recorder, specified that those spaces were, in fact, common areas, subject to the rules regarding common areas, and were to be maintained by the association.
From a legal and practical standpoint, the Board did not have the authority to change the nature of the ownership of the common areas. But we also struggled with how to maintain all these different, fenced-in areas. Much as with our national politics, liberals love to make rules and love to then ignore them and act like it is no big deal.