The chairman’s notes said the other applications were approved because they were “temporary medical accommodations,” which was exactly what mine was. I asked my lawyer to pull the original applications and not just the approval letters. The first one belonged to a woman whose husband had been recovering from a hip replacement, and the second belonged to a man whose wife used a wheelchair. Both applications had photographs, measurements, contractor information, and a statement from the homeowners explaining why the ramps were necessary. Mine had all the same things. The only difference was that my husband had come home from rehab, and the chairman had written one sentence across the top of my application before the committee ever met: “Owner has been advised this will not be approved.”
My lawyer asked who had advised him, and the association sent us the meeting notes. There was no vote recorded on my application at all. Instead, there was a handwritten note from the chairman saying the ramp would “set a precedent” and that approving it would encourage other homeowners to make changes to their properties. But then my lawyer noticed something in the approval history that I hadn’t seen. The two other ramps weren’t actually approved under the same rule they had cited to deny mine. They had been approved under a different section that allowed medical modifications when the homeowner submitted documentation from a licensed provider. I had submitted that documentation. So my lawyer requested the committee’s internal correspondence from March through August.
There were forty-three emails, and most were about landscaping and paint colors. Then we found one thread from the week my application was denied. The chairman had forwarded my application to the association’s attorney with a message asking whether there was “a way to make her remove it permanently.” The attorney replied that there might be, because my husband was not the homeowner who had originally purchased the property. My lawyer read that twice and asked me whether anyone had ever told me there was a problem with our deed. I said no. She pulled the county records and found the deed from when we bought the house. My husband’s name was on it, but the person listed as the seller wasn’t the person who had owned the house — and that same person was now the chairman of our architectural committee.
