The member’s name was a lawyer I’d seen at association meetings before, but I’d never known he had any connection to the developer. His name was on the LLC filing as the sole member, and his office was the same address listed for the association’s attorney. I called him and asked why he owned the parcel where our playground had been for sixteen years. He said the association had released it because maintaining the playground had become too expensive and that the sale was part of a long-term plan for the neighborhood. I said there had been no vote. He said the board had authority to act. I told him the declaration said common property could only be conveyed with a two-thirds vote of the membership. He went quiet, then asked me who had given me a copy of the declaration. I said I’d pulled it from the courthouse. He said there had been an amendment since then. I asked when. He said January.
I went back to the courthouse and pulled the amendment myself. It was filed six days before the land was sold, and it changed the definition of common area so that any parcel “no longer serving an active recreational purpose” could be conveyed by the board without a membership vote. I asked the clerk whether the amendment had been recorded before or after the playground came down. She checked the date and said it had been recorded two weeks after the construction fence went up. That meant they had removed the playground first, then changed the rules to make the sale possible. But the part that bothered me most was the signature page. Five board members had signed it, and beside each signature was a notary stamp from the same afternoon. I knew three of those people personally. One had been out of state that week, another had been recovering from surgery, and the third had told me at the April meeting that she hadn’t even known the playground was being removed. I called her that night. She said she had never signed anything.
Then I noticed something I’d missed on the LLC filing. The lawyer wasn’t listed as the person who had actually paid the dollar. The document showed the LLC had been funded by a separate company, and that company had been registered only eleven days before the sale. I pulled that filing too. The registered agent was the same law office, but the mailing address belonged to a company that owned several vacant lots outside the subdivision. I called the county assessor and asked who owned those lots. He read me the name and then stopped. He said the ownership had changed three times in the previous six months, but every company had the same registered agent. Then he told me something that made me drive back to the subdivision that evening: the new owner had already submitted a preliminary site plan for the playground parcel. It wasn’t for another playground or a community building. It was for six private lots, and the person who had signed the application as the developer was the association president’s husband.
