Update: HOA board bans media, observers from recall vote | Opinion
Update:
The board of the Fairmont Homeowners Association has banned the media and neutral observers from attending Wednesday evening’s special meeting, where homeowners will decide whether to recall board members who have already overstayed their one-year term of office by five months.
It’s certainly on brand.
The HOA board has repeatedly shunned any sort of transparency, oversight or scrutiny over the past 17 months since their last election, and apparently violated a state law mandating a meeting of the members at least once a year (their first members’ meeting occurred 14 months into their term).
During that time, reform-minded homeowners have uncovered substantial evidence of unlawful closed meetings, and self-dealing violating the HOA bylaws, including board members paying each other for doing jobs around the property and waiving their own HOA dues.
It culminated in a petition by HOA members to force a vote on whether they continue in office.
On Tuesday, the board posted this on its member portal: “Attendance Members Only. Tomorrow’s 8/20/25 will be a members only meeting. This means no guests or media/reporters will be allowed.”
It was signed “Created by Fairmont Owners Association.”
Intriguing.
The last time I covered a meeting of the HOA in June, the president of the association stopped me at the door and told me I’d have to leave. He and the board reluctantly relented when several members of the association invited me back in and demanded I be allowed to stay, so I could hear their complaints against the board.
It is what it is. State law guarantees members have to be allowed in, but nobody else does.
I can guarantee you this, if they think closing the meeting will prevent coverage, they’re wrong. If I have to report from outside, well, it won’t be the first time.
In the final analysis, this really isn’t a test of the board. They have already failed.
It’s a test of the HOA members.
Do they care whether there’s any oversight on how their dues are spent? Do they care whether significant decisions affecting their lives and property are made by a handful of people, meeting behind closed doors, without their knowledge or consent? Or do they just care if the grass gets cut and the pool gets cleaned?
That’s not a decision I, or anyone else, can make for them.
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Original column
About 25 people gathered under two small shade trees in oppressive heat, listening to candidates who hope to reform their homeowners association into an organization that is more about the rights of the neighbors and less about the privileges of the board of directors.
That was the scene in the Fairmont neighborhood Monday evening, at a forum organized by Wichita Independent Neighborhoods.
WIN president Trish Hileman facilitated the forum and gave a brief tutorial on Roberts Rules of Order, the guidebook by which HOA meetings are supposed to be run.
On Wednesday evening, the members of the Fairmont Homeowners Association will have the opportunity to put better governance into practice by recalling the current board and installing another.
Given that the current board is now 17 months into what the bylaws state is a 12-month term of office, you may wonder why they didn’t just call an election.
I’m not going to attribute motives here, but I will talk about the effect.
By making residents gather petition signatures to force a recall vote, it will presumably take just over 50% of the voting homeowners to remove an incumbent board member.
In a regular election, a candidate challenging the incumbents wouldn’t need to get more than half the votes, just enough to finish near the top. As it stands now, that would be fifth place, but this board has not been shy about reducing the number of seats when it’s to their advantage (they did it after their last election in March 2024, so the sixth-place finisher didn’t get the seat the board announced she’d won).
Like Al Gore once said: “You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little known third category.”
In a commentary I wrote (fair warning, it’s quite long) published on Kansas.com on Saturday and in The Wichita Eagle on Sunday, I detailed multiple instances where the board of the association has abused their authority, in apparent violations of the association bylaws and/or the Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill Of Rights Act, the state law regulating how HOAs and similar organizations do business.
In addition to reducing board seats after the election, booting reformer Shala Perez, they also gave her an outrageous surprise bill for $2,827, to access HOA spending records she has every right to see. After a year in which they sent the bill to a collection agency and banned her from HOA amenities, the board relented in June. Their lawyer said in a June meeting that the situation had been mishandled from the start.
Board members paid each other for doing jobs around the property (including $250 a month to the board president for keeping the books, which were in total disarray), and they waived their own HOA dues, despite a bylaw that says “No director shall receive compensation for any service he may render to the Association.”
Oh, and they didn’t hold a meeting open to the membership for 14 months (state law requires at least an annual meeting). During that time, they took significant and final action on several items, including hiring a lawyer and a management company, and appointing a board member to fill a vacancy, without doing so in open meetings as the state law specifies.
A new twist emerged Monday evening: homeowners Kari and Nick Oglesby, (she a bank auditor and he a financial planner) have been conducting an audit of the association. Nick said one thing they discovered was that the organization had filed tax returns as a corporation rather than a nonprofit, which meant they didn’t have to disclose payments from the HOA to board members.
WIN stepped in (despite discouragement from the board), not to take sides in the dispute, but to try to encourage conditions under which the homeowners can control their association through agreed-upon rules that everybody follows.
“Whether the board or board members get recalled on Wednesday or not, you guys are aware now that the board that sits Wednesday forward needs to find out some more things about the details of your neighborhood, right?” Hileman said. “And they need to maybe do a better job reading the bylaws and making sure they know how they’re supposed to function, that you guys have regular meetings. Most organizations need regular meetings so that everybody can stay in the loop and in the know and get to vote on things. That’s, that’s just real important.”
The opportunity is there for the members of the Fairmont HOA to see to it that going forward things are done right. Here’s hoping they do.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 2:45 PM.
