Marlene’s response to the TRO was not to comply quietly and move on like a reasonable person. Her response was to escalate, methodically, persistently, and with the particular creativity that petty power develops when it’s been denied something it considers its birthright.
First, she had the HOA install a new entry gate at the east entrance. Not an old gate, a new gate. Fourteen thousand dollars from the community reserve fund, approved in an emergency board session held with twenty-four hours notice at 7:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, which she knew most working residents couldn’t attend.
The gate had a keypad, a sensor arm, and crucially, a posted weight limit of eight thousand pounds. A loaded school bus weighs approximately twenty-six thousand pounds. The TRO covered the easement’s use. It did not, Marlene’s attorney argued, prohibit the HOA from making structural improvements to common property, including a gate that happened to have a weight limit.
Vivian was annoyed in the clinical way that good lawyers get annoyed, precisely and with documentation. “She’s gatekeeping with infrastructure,” Vivian told me on the phone. “It’s creative. I’ll give her that.” “Can we stop it?” “We can go back to court, but that takes time. In the short-term, the school district’s buses are blocked again.”
Lily went back to walking. I drove her myself, parking on the county road and watching her cross until I could see Earl’s bus from where I stood. And I waited every afternoon the same way. But I was also watching other things.
I started attending every HOA meeting, every single one. I sat in the front row with a legal pad, took handwritten notes, date, time, speaker, exact wording, and submitted public records requests for every board communication and expenditure going back thirty-six months. This is your right in most states. HOA financial records and meeting minutes are member accessible documents.
In Georgia, under the Georgia Property Owners Association Act, OCGA Section 44-3-226, HOA members have the right to inspect financial records, meeting minutes, and governing documents upon written request, and the HOA must respond within thirty days.
What I found in those records was interesting. The fourteen thousand dollar gate had been approved from the community reserve fund, but there were two problems. First, the reserve fund had a minimum balance requirement written into the HOA’s own bylaws, fifty thousand dollars. And after the gate expenditure, the balance was forty-seven thousand two hundred dollars. They had violated their own rules.
Second, the vendor who installed the gate was Duckett and Sons Exterior Solutions, a company registered in Chatham County. Marlene’s nephew ran it. I printed this on paper and put it in a folder. I labeled the folder for later. I was learning to be patient.