Welcome back!

Still trying to get a meeting of the community. Why is that so hard?

We were off the air, so to speak, while we dealt with the fines the board imposed on me for canvassing and writing to you. Nothing has been resolved yet though I filed a complaint at District Court, Small Claims Division, to recover my fine and court costs.

One of the reasons I want to amend the By-Laws is to be able to charge board members with having to understand the By-Laws before they get seated on the board. The current disagreement with the board centers, in part, on the board’s apparent lack of understanding of the By-Laws it is supposed to enforce.

The first charge against me is for solicitation when I went door to door seeking your signatures for a petition to hold a special meeting. The claim is specious, baseless, designed to harass me. The By-Laws themselves state,

“It shall be the duty of the President to call a special meeting of the Unit Owners as directed by the Board of Managers, or upon a petition signed by at least one-third in number of the Unit Owners…”

Remember, these By-Laws are over 50 ears old, and the drafters didn’t think twice about petitioning, i.e. going door-to-door to collect signatures, because how else do you collect signatures?

Then there is the matter of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, have deemed to protect political speech, which petitioning certainly is. This form of protected speech is called canvassing, not soliciting. To think soliciting applies here means you should be careful about speaking to your neighbors, which is absurd.

My other infraction is supposedly misuse of the resident email list. Well, bad news there. There is no proprietary list because all the names on the list belong to you, not the Association. Any list “owner” only has rights in the curation of their list. That’s why it’s so important to keep your lists secure. Curation means keeping the list up to date when people move, for instance. Without curation a list is merely a compilation of data. With curation, there is a reasonable expectation that the names on the list, for example, correspond to actual people living in Greenbrook. That’s what makes a curated list valuable.

Now, here’s the thing, rights to the curation evaporate when a list is placed in the public domain, which happened when the office inappropriately used the Greenbrook list in an email to all homeowners. We all have a copy of that email. The association’s assertion that the list is theirs is therefore false. They know it’s false too because their charge against me conveniently omits any reference to placing the list in the public domain.

All this notwithstanding, we have gone to no small effort to curate our own list from publicly available sources. You are on our list because you are reading this. Our list is smaller than the list Greenbrook placed into the public domain, and we have done our best to ensure its accuracy. IF YOUDO NOT WISH TO BE ON THE GREENBROOK PERSPECTIVES LIST, simply send an email with the word REMOVE or UNSUBSCRIBE and you will be removed.

Our court date is in January, right in the middle of Greenbrook Annual Meeting Season.

If I was a board member, I’d be trying to build a record to run on for the next election, not harassing homeowners with fines. Just sayin’.

If you’d like to reach me: Denis@BeagleResearch.com or reply to this post.

Call me to set up an appointment to sign the petition. Many other homeowners have done this.

Or just say Hi when you see me on the street with Rooster the Wonder Dog.

UNSUBSCRIBE ANY TIME BY SENDING AN EMAIL TO ME WITH JUST THE WORD “UNSUBSCRIBE”.

You can also express your opinions to the board any time at GreenbrookOffice@AOL.com

Bye for now.