The loan documents said the association had borrowed nine hundred thousand dollars and pledged our lots as collateral, but I couldn’t find a single mention of that loan in four years of newsletters, meeting minutes, or financial reports. Our bylaws require a membership vote before the association can encumber the properties, and the loan paperwork included a certification saying that vote had happened in 2022. I was at the 2022 meeting, and the only thing we voted on was replacing the pool furniture. I asked the board president about it, and he said the loan had been necessary for a pipe replacement and that everyone had benefited from the work. He also said the vote had been “handled” properly.
The loan file included a secretary’s certificate stating that the required vote had taken place, and the secretary’s signature was on the bottom of it. I called her because I wanted to understand what had actually happened, and she was eighty-one and immediately said she had never seen the document before. She told me she signs whatever the management company puts in front of her and had assumed it was routine paperwork. Then she remembered the day the papers supposedly had been signed and said someone had brought documents to her house because she couldn’t drive to the office. I asked who had come to her house, and she said it wasn’t anyone from the management company.
She described a board member who had arrived with a stack of papers and told her she needed to sign them before the bank deadline. I pulled the bank’s closing file and compared the dates, and the secretary’s signature had been applied two days before the loan actually closed. My lawyer requested the original certification and found that the signature page had been scanned separately from the rest of the document. Then the bank produced the electronic records showing the certification had been uploaded by the board president — and the attachment he uploaded wasn’t the secretary’s original document, but a version that had been altered after she supposedly signed it.
