This whole mess began with two simple violations. At least they claimed, and still claim, that they were violations. I’ll let you be the judge until this is all in front of a judge, which will come soon enough.
This all started because my wife’s identity was stolen in 2018. My wife had a stroke ten years ago and while she is still an intelligent and competent human being, she has trouble with paperwork and fine print. Because of this she doesn’t read much mail, so by the time we found out the credit card had been canceled, she had missed payments to a number of places where the card had been on autopay. If you know anyone who has trouble with reading and keeping up with paperwork, they will tell you that autopay is the only way they get by in life.
Every other institution, her bank, her auto insurance, her health insurance company, and a number of others, was very understanding and got rid of the fees and helped her get her new card on file. But not First Service, and definitely not the Spring Mountain Ranch Master Association and it’s board members.
First Service Residential told me that they were able to waive one $10 late fee per year and we had more than that, so I just paid the extra. An employee named Shalice at First Service told me that we owed $162.50 and that would make us current. I paid that amount and thought the matter was over. I was disappointed that my HOA, who I expected to be the easiest to deal with on the identity theft issue since it was made up our neighbors and supposed to be a “community” had been the hardest to deal with, but I considered it a lesson learned and thought no more of it.
This was a huge mistake. I know that now. They are hell bent on collecting every nickel they can get out of us and the way they treated these late fees was a prelude to our coming nightmare. By the time we realized it (there was never an email or a phone call sent, and my wife never opened the monthly mailings from the HOA since it gave her terrible headaches from eyestrain and they had never had anything useful in them) we owed more than $200 in late fees?
Late fees? On what? Good question. And you’re going to hate the answer. When I was told I owed $162.50, it didn’t include a late fee that was being assessed on the late fee that very week. So when I paid the $162.50, it left a $10 balance that was supposed to be waived but was not. And that $10 cost us $300 in late fees ON A LATE FEE that should never have existed.
Now I thought this was entirely too much. So I applied for a waiver and went to a board meeting to plead my case. I assumed that my neighbors on the board would hear my story and say something like
“Well, that’s ridiculous. We’ll talk to FSR and get rid of that, you shouldn’t owe that.”
Instead, they grilled me on why I hadn’t pair the original late fee, questioned my wife’s stroke (she is legally disabled) and why she was opening the mail, and gave me an attitude as if I was begging for charity instead of asking them to fix what seemed like an obvious mix up that had not cost the association anything and appeared to be the fault of the service company.
FSR, by the way, claimed that the phone call didn’t happen. Their representative claimed to have recorded the phone calls and listened to them and found no evidence of my claim that I was told the payoff amount was $162.50. As if I had intentionally paid ten dollars less and tried to be sneaky about it.
Of course, I knew what the phone conversation was, so I called their bluff.
The claim, in an email from FSR employee Shalice Edwards, was
“I’ve reviewed your Customer Care call logs (all recorded and documented) and cannot validate an associate advising you that your account is current, please provide specific date, time and individual you spoke with.”
My response was simply
“This may be helpful. I thought for sure I was told that the payment would bring my account to current. Can you send me the audio of those calls? Thank you for your assistance.”
She then replied with a log of my calls and a few of them highlighted, asking me what date the calls happened. From six months ago? You think I have a log of my phone calls that goes back six months with labels like “Called HOA, Janet Thompson says $162.20 is payout amount at 2:15 pm.” Really?
Here are the next two emails in that chain. I ask if they can send me the recordings, and they decide that they can “no longer continue this dialogue” which is great way to avoid talking about the lie you are caught in.
From there, I went to the board meeting of my HOA, was insulted by the board members, and eventually notified that hey had reduced the late fees on my original $10 late fee from $300 to $100. I mean, I guess that does reduce it from three thousand percent to only one thousand percent, so it’s sort of a bargain…
Anyway, I didn’t think it was worth going to court over a hundred dollars, which is exactly why they reduced fines the way they do, so I paid them and let it go. I switched the HOA fees to be paid by my debit card so that I could make sure this never happened again, and thought our issues with the HOA were over. Unfortunately, we were just getting started.
A few years later, having never missed a payment nor had even the tiniest squabble with my neighbors, I was suddenly informed that I owed $1,600 for violations I had never heard of. Let’s look at those violations and how they developed.
“Violation 1” – If they don’t know, how the hell should I?
We’ll call this violation 1, because I still have no idea what the violation was really for. The fun part? They don’t know either. I was originally told it was for the bin in the picture below, which was taken on March 9th. Since the rule they quoted in the violation states (in part) that “No rubbish or debris of any kind shall be placed or permitted to accumulate anywhere within the community which can be seen or smelled by owners” it makes sense.
My wife has serious back problems, with multiple surgeries in the eight years that we’ve been together and some before that, but she still loves to garden. She left the bin out for a few hours during the day while she was working on the plants and they got a picture of it and slapped us with a violation.
This picture was taken by an employee of First Service. Someone they pay a meager wage to drive around and take pictures of violations. I stopped one of these people once and asked them about the rules they were supposed to be enforcing. The representative from First Service Residential knew absolutely nothing about them and told me “That’s not my job. I just take pictures.” Then she drive off.
What annoyed me initially was that my wife using that bin and going back and forth all morning. To get this picture, without her in it, was either a remarkable coincidence and the FSR employee just happened to come by at the exact moment she was on the other side of the house, of they had to wait specifically for her to be out of the frame to get the picture.
Whatever happened, this bin was gone by the afternoon and that should have been the end of things. But you’ll hear that phrase many times in my story. This all should have ended many times over.
I thought the violation was ridiculous, so I printed out a picture of the same area without the bin and mailed it to First Service Residential with a printed letter indicating what had happened, how their employee should be documenting violations (not manufacturing them) and how we believed we were being singled out as our neighbors had many similar things and were not being sent violation letters. We are very good neighbors, and in fact our neighbors all agree that we have the nicest yard on the block. We just wanted to be left alone.
The mail was never answered, and later FSR claimed they never received it. They also claim to have never received another letter I sent a few months later documenting a number of other problems. This pairs nicely with their claim to have no recollection of phone conversations and refusal to back up claims they have made in email exchanges. From then on, and for all conversations in the future, it is email only. I don’t trust FSR for a second.
You can see in the picture above, with the bin, that it was taken on March 9th. The second photo, which shows a continuing violation, not only doesn’t show the bin anymore, but is taken at such an angle that it can only have been shot from my neighbors yard, something they aren’t supposed to be doing.
This photo appears to show a shelving unit, that was clearly not there in the previous photo. Is a shelving unit even rubbish? I wouldn’t think so, but that is beside the point, because this was used as evidence of a continuing violation, not a new violation. They can’t levy a $50 per week fine on a new violation, but they can if it is a continuing violation that hasn’t been fixed.
The two pictures don’t show any of the same things, but why let the facts get in the way of collecting money from the people community right? An HOA with millions of dollars in the bank manufacturing violations? Yep, there’s no other answer here. It’s just never enough for them.
Here’s another one from August, where they have already received my cease and desist letter (and ignored it) and continue to try to tack on fines to the same “violation”. The HOA board, when asked in person, claimed it was the shelving that they thought must be the problem, though I expect they’ll deny that too. And the shelving is not in the first photo, nor is it in the photo from August, both of which are listed as proof of an ongoing violation!
I can only comer up with two reasons why the FSR employee would continue to take pictures to try to justify a continuing violation without actually documenting the same thing. Either that employee is targeting us, which honestly doesn’t seem likely, though they did seem offended when I asked them about the rules, or they have been instructed to keep violations ongoing as long as possible to collect as much money as possible. Occam’s Razor, as well as the old saw “Follow the money” seem to indicate that the latter is much more likely.
“Violation” #2 – Why Us (and this isn’t rubbish either)
If you thought the first few “violations” were ridiculous, just wait, this one is incredible. Our second violation, which came around the same time as the bin/shelves/nothing violation, was for a wire hanging from the side of our house.
A little background on this. Basically every house in my neighborhood has an old Dish TV satellite dish mounted on the edge of the roof. When the neighborhood was built 25 years ago there was no cable or internet access, so everyone got Dish. Then cable and internet arrived, Dish couldn’t compare, and everyone dumped them. But the old dishes are all still up there.
See how the wire sticks out a couple inches from the house at the top there? Apparently that is a violation. Of what, I’m not sure. they claim that they can’t include everything in the CC&R documents, which is akin to saying “We just write violations for whatever we want.”
The piece of the CC&R docs they claim for this one is the same as violation #1, and I’ll paste in a copy of the whole section below. I see absolutely nothing that relates to a wire hanging off a house. This is simply not a violation of any kind. It seems plain and simple that this is not a violation and this is exactly why the HOA board has the power to remove these kinds of violations. When an incompetent management company writes up a fine for something that is clearly not a violation, it should be as simple as “Yep, that shouldn’t be a violation” and it’s gone. But our board doesn’t work that way at all. More on our board members and how they do their jobs later.
As you can see, there is absolutely nothing in the section above that relates to a write hanging a few inches off a house. But it gets better than that. Remember that I mentioned that everyone in my neighborhood has one of these dishes and that they haven’t been in use for many years? Well, I took a walk around the block with my camera, curious how many other houses had worse hanging wires.
On my ONE BLOCK I found 14 examples of hanging wires worse than mine. All were visible from the road, and all were easy to spot for an incompetent FSR employee taking pictures out of their car window. And when I was walking around taking pictures it allowed me to meet some of my neighbors who lived farther away or on the other side of the block.
I met six of the people who have these hanging wires and told them why I was taking pictures. All six of them told me they supported what I was doing, that I could take all the pictures I wanted, and that they hated the HOA and the silly violations they were getting from First Service Residential. None of those six people had ever gotten a violation for the wire hanging from their house.
Here are the pictures. I showed these to the board directly at one of our meetings, and their response was “Well you can’t prove that they aren’t also getting fines.” and “We can’t list every possible violation in our CC&R docs, but we think this is clearly a violation.”
The photo below is of Stephen Gillan’s home. The wire is hanging from a satellite antenna off his gazebo. When I showed it to him, he claimed that it wasn’t a violation in his case because it wasn’t hanging off a house, it was an outbuilding. Can you imagine have the gall to say that to someone that you are trying to take $1,700 from for a hanging wire that is much less conspicuous than your own? That was six months ago, and as of today the wire is still hanging there in plain view. No violations, and no attempt to fix it. And the rest of the board backed him up. Cronyism if I’ve ever seen it. And no surprise that in an HOA with over 1,600 homes, Stephen and two of his fellow board members all live on the same block.
Mr. Gillan was not the most rude of the bunch, but his blatantly worse hanging wire and his explanation that “It’s not attached directly to my house.” was the most absurd and insulting.
After two physical mails and a phone call, it was determined that First Service was going to stick to their guns claiming this was a violation. I can only assume that they either haven’t read the CC&R documents, or that they are not willing to give up on this one because then they would have to stop writing up everyone for whatever they feel like. Since Sara McFarland, my contact at FSR, is clearly an intelligent woman, I can only assume the latter. Apathy or corruption, I’m not sure which.
Sara at FSR has been both helpful and part of the problem. On one hand, she has tried to help me plead my case to the HOA multiple times, or at least she claims she has. She has urged me in multiple emails to kiss their asses and fix the fake violations and that they would “probably” let all this go. Like a fool, I did exactly that. I hired someone to fix the wire and attach it closely to the house, believing that the HOA board really didn’t want to go to court and wasn’t hell bent on taking my money. Well that was more money wasted, and the last thing I will ever do for this HOA without a binding contract, because it was, like everything from them, bullshit.
After spending money to have the wire fixed, and uploading photos to show that the bin and shelving unit were no longer there (they hadn’t been for months), the HOA board decided that I only owed them $800 for the violations that never existed. What a bargain. But they really didn’t want to end up in court, and they know it takes time, so they added the caveat that this deal was only good if I paid in full within 45 days.
Don’t have $800 to drop all at once? Tough shit, pay the full amount. Want to wait until after a referee from the state of Nevada looks at this? Tough shit, we’re gonna charge you the whole amount and start adding tons of extra fees to it if you want to challenge us. These people are the very definition of bad neighbors.
I also pointed out to the board at one of our meetings, that First Service Residential is one of the lowest rated HOA management companies in the entire state. They didn’t care enough to even address it and ignored me completely on that point. More on that at the First Service Residential page.
As it stands now, I have filed with the state of Nevada to get a referee to look at my case, and if that fails, or if the HOA refuses to accept their decision, then we can go to court. I’m also suing FSR separately in small claims court. Their incompetence and refusal to correct their mistakes is a big part of the problem, so I expect that to go well in small claims court and FSR can pay the fees for me.
The account has gone into collections with no notice to me at all, and now I couldn’t even pay the fine if I wanted to because I’m locked out of the payment side of my account. I don’t even know what the balance is. I have emailed Sara McFarland, but have no response so far and am certainly not holding my breath for any positive developments.