We elected a man named Ernesto to the board in 2023. He was a retired county auditor, and from the first meeting he started asking questions nobody else seemed interested in asking. In May he requested copies of the vendor contracts, and in June he asked why the landscaping contract had been renewed without competitive bids for nine straight years. In July the board removed him, using the bylaw that allows directors to be removed for “conduct detrimental to the association.” The specific conduct they listed was that he had repeatedly requested records. Ernesto didn’t fight the removal. He was seventy-three, his wife was sick, and he told me he simply didn’t have the energy for a legal battle.
But before he stepped away, he gave me a folder he’d kept at home. Inside was the landscaping contract, and the total over nine years was four hundred and eleven thousand dollars. The company had a name that sounded professional, but it had no website, no reviews, and apparently only one truck. Its business license listed a residential address instead of a commercial property. I recognized the address immediately because it was inside our own community. I asked Ernesto whether he’d already brought that up with the board, and he said yes. He had shown the address to the president in June, and two weeks later the motion to remove him was introduced.
I pulled the state business filing myself and found the registered address belonged to one of our board members. The company wasn’t in that board member’s name, though. The listed owner was someone I’d never heard of, and the filing had been changed shortly before the landscaping contract was renewed. Then Ernesto showed me something he’d noticed in the invoices: for nine years, the checks went to the company, but several of the invoices were approved by the same board member whose house was listed as the company’s registered address. And when we pulled the original 2015 contract, the signature authorizing the first agreement belonged to that same board member — except he hadn’t joined the board until 2018, which meant the person who supposedly signed the original contract couldn’t legally have signed it in that capacity at the time.
