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Baitball Blogger

(46,532 posts)
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 09:40 PM Nov 2019

Little Conspiracies - More tales of bad behavior in my Florida HOA.

Sometimes I wonder how people are going to react when they read about the strange things that seem to happen all too often around here. I can tell you that I've never read anywhere else the kind of things that seem to be normal in my development. Today I'll write about how people behave when they are afraid that someone is catching on to the fact that our Association has been under the influence of backwater dealings for some time. Keep in mind that all if not most of my observations come from video clips from the security cameras that I have collected over the years.

For those that don't know, my neighborhood was involved in a larger community scandal in the nineties. The extent of the good ole boy maneuvering that took place in the early stages of the development is now coming to the surface because the poorly constructed areas are now in need of repair. No one wants to pay - and no one should since the city's backwater methods are largely to blame. The city leaders empowered the wrong kind of people who not only helped interfere with the business interests of a developer, but they also thought they could enrich themselves by defrauding members of my community by spreading misinformation about our legal rights. That is the big picture.

But I study human behavior and how this affected them in the years that followed has been a point of interest. There are patterns. Like the person who used to be afraid that someone would follow her in her early morning walks. Keep in mind that I am not usually wide awake and out of bed until after nine in the am so I have to rely on quick scans of the security camera clips to see what happened in the morning. I assumed she was concerned because a couple of time she pointed at my house before she left and her husband took a picture of my car, probably to show her that no one drove the car out of the driveway while she was gone. I just wonder how many other people she inconvenienced with what could be interpreted as defamation. Seriously, what is anyone going to do around here? We're more scared of them because of their connections.

I always wondered how much of her "fear" was made up because no one else in this neighborhood had ever moved in and walked so comfortably in and around people's houses in the early morning hours. And I say this as someone who was very concerned when she started trespassing on my property. It is something that has been remedied once I got the police involved.

But, there are still signs that small groups are still meeting and I would love to hear from other people in HOAs to find out if this kind of behavior is normal: Someone jogs in and out before or after the cabal leaves in their cars at the same time in the morning. What is the jogger, a look out? It's the same guy that comes in sporadically, but always at a time when it appears that cabal members are leaving in groups. The guy doesn't live in the community so it's a tell. .

The worst I have seen was when a group of neighbors were loaded up in a van and left for a meeting which took most of the day. While they were gone, the same two or three cars drove in and out of the neighborhood, slowly, like they were making sure no one was messing with the cabal's property. A few months after that meeting, the cable company came in and laid down new cable on their side of the community. I imagine that's why they wanted secrecy.

But I determined that this was a practiced method when I wrote to the president of the Association to discuss an issue of concern. He responded with a hand-written letter delivered to my door to tell me that he had a HOA meeting to discuss the issue and I could appear at a board meeting where he would tell us what they had decided. Except, that there was no noticed HOA meeting. They just talk among themselves and come up with a consensus.

All this happened within the last five years. Because I made a stink of things, usually by writing about them on this website, there are signs that they are waking up. Like they are finally publicly noticing our HOA meetings. But they still can't resist with those private get-togethers, which I directly relate to the backwater methods that still control every aspect of our lives.

Like this morning, when the tall man jogged in and out; and cars from the usual suspects left at the same time. And tonight, when board members met for an hour, at the same time that more of the usual suspects walked or jogged up and down the street.

It's Florida, and if I've learned anything about this community, we don't enjoy the benefits of a legally run HOA that is concerned with fiduciary responsibility because too many people are tribal and putting their interests first. And it won't get better until it is all exposed. Much like the problem we have with Trump at a National level.

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