I reported the pool chemicals in June after my seven-year-old grandson came out of the water with burns on his back, and we spent four hours in the emergency room. I filed the report with the health department because that is what you’re supposed to do when a common facility may be unsafe. The county inspected the pool, shut it down for eleven days, and fined the association four thousand dollars. A month later the board suddenly adopted a rule saying residents had to submit any concerns about common facilities directly to the board before contacting an outside agency. A lawyer told me over the phone that the rule was not enforceable, but the board fined me five hundred dollars anyway and then another five hundred when I refused to pay it.
In September they suspended my pool access, my gate code, and my parking pass, and my grandson kept asking why he couldn’t go swimming anymore. I didn’t know what to tell him because the pool was still closed for repairs and I wasn’t going to explain a dispute with the board to a seven-year-old. Then in October my neighbor showed me something she’d found on the association portal. The document properties said the rule had been created in July, but the covenant amendment filed with the county had been dated in May. May was before my grandson was hurt. I asked my lawyer to pull the original filing and the notary records because I wanted to know which date was real. The amendment had been notarized in May, and the notary’s journal showed that the board president had brought her a document that already contained the exact language about reporting concerns to the board.
My lawyer then requested the board emails from May and June, and that’s where everything changed. There were messages discussing the pool several weeks before my grandson ever got hurt, including one from the maintenance company saying the chemical readings were “outside the normal range” and recommending that the pool be closed until someone inspected the system. The board president replied that closing it during the summer would cause “unnecessary attention” and asked whether the maintenance company could simply adjust the chemicals and keep the pool open. Then, two days before my grandson was burned, another email mentioned that a resident had complained about the smell and that the board needed to “get ahead of this.” The rule they claimed was created because of my June report had actually been written weeks earlier — before my grandson was hurt — because the board already knew someone was going to report what was happening at that pool.
