Covenant Enforcement

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The Jefferson County District Court ruled last week that a condominium association can prohibit smoking in their four-unit building.   The Heritage Hills #1 Condominium Owners Association amended its bylaws to ban smoking after an owner complained about smoke seeping into her unit.  The District Court upheld the bylaw change stating that second hand smoke "constitutes a nuisance"…

We frequently get questions from our clients and their managers asking about enforcement of architectural guidelines, and particularly, the ability to either require a homeowner to obtain architectural review committee approval before making improvements, or alternatively, requiring a homeowner to remove improvements already made without committee approval. While there is no universal answer, there are some generalities.
Continue Reading How Enforceable Are Those Architectural Guidelines?

The weather is warm, your Association’s pool is prepped for summer, and Memorial Day is just around the corner. Everything is fine until the owners currently contesting their Association debt (the same owners whose case is currently set for trial in one month) call to request the pool key. Their son’s birthday falls over the weekend and the whole family will be in town to celebrate at the pool. Your Association documents say the key can be withheld if the account of the owner is not in good standing. Do you give them the key?
Continue Reading The Pool Key: to Withhold or Not to Withhold

Most covenant-controlled communities have at least one owner that does not play by the rules. The mere mention of covenants may conjure an image of that purple house, untended lawn, or RV owner in your own neighborhood – that house that becomes a sort of sideshow within the community due to the on-going battle between the association and the owner. On the rare occasion, failure to abide by the covenants results in a dream deferred.
Continue Reading When Covenants Collide with the American Dream

I previously made an entry on this site which contained stories about a homeowners association in Florida that prohibited the housing of hurricane Katrina victims within the community. The Community Assocition Institute (CAI) has since taken a strong position with regard to communities that are disallowing homeowners from opening their homes to evacuees of hurricane…

The number of methamphetamine laboratories found in Colorado communities continues to grow. The availability of low cost ingredients and a simple recipe for the drug has allowed unsophisticated drug “cookers” to open up shop in hotel rooms, vehicles and, more importantly, condominiums, townhouses and single family homes. Due to the flammable nature of the ingredients, meth labs often explode and cause tremendous fires. For those communities unlucky enough to have a meth lab, the fact that it did not explode into a fireball seems like little consolation. Often by the time law enforcement has enough evidence to raid the unit, the damage has been done.
Continue Reading Meth Labs

Association Boards often contact our office to determine how to deal with a regularly-occurring problem that just doesn’t seem to require or deserve the response that has customarily been given. Understandably, the Board desires to treat each owner fairly and believes that to do so, it must treat each owner similarly. However, the value of a Board of Directors is that it is composed of people who each bring their life experiences and judgment to the position. A Board need not�and in fact�should not treat each owner in an identical manner when the circumstances do not justify such treatment. Instead, the Board should exercise its collective business judgment in a good faith and reasonable manner to treat similar circumstances similarly. This is much different than treating each owner in the same manner.
Continue Reading The Fear of Setting Precedents