I read the note twice. "She's taking from all of us. Some of us can see it. It's time to act."
I didn't know who had sent it. I also didn't know how the sender had obtained records that appeared private. That bothered me. My dislike of Victoria did not give me a right to circulate somebody else's personal financial information, and using suspiciously acquired material could undermine everything else I had done.
I put the documents in an envelope of my own and contacted a local attorney named Nadia Flores. She had represented homeowners in association disputes and had no connection to Maria. I explained the records I had received and how they had arrived. Nadia told me not to publish them, not to confront Victoria with them, and not to make accusations based on documents whose origin couldn't be established.
"Preserve the envelope and note," she said. "Let an appropriate investigator decide what can lawfully be used. What you can prove from association records is already serious enough."
The advice was less exciting than a dramatic showdown. It was also exactly what I needed.
Nadia agreed to review the governing documents and the board's authority to impose assessments. When I dropped off the copies, she asked for the association's original declaration and amendments.
"Do you have the incorporation file?" she asked.
"From the current website."
"I mean the recorded original. Sometimes what an association thinks it has the right to do is not what the recorded documents actually say."
That evening, I searched the county records index and found the original incorporation packet from 1995. Some pages had been scanned badly, but the declaration was readable. I printed it and sat at the kitchen table with an old calculator I had borrowed from the maintenance room at work.
The fee escalation provision was tucked into a section about regular assessments. It limited annual increases without member approval to three percent or the applicable cost-of-living adjustment, whichever was lower, subject to the precise requirements of the recorded declaration. It also described procedures for special assessments and member votes.
I compared the language to the assessment history. At some point in the association's history, the monthly charge had started rising faster than the stated cap. I couldn't yet establish whether later recorded amendments or lawful votes had authorized some of the increases. But the management company had produced no such records, and the versions on the website contained no amendment altering that limit.
I started with the original baseline and worked forward year by year. The highest monthly amount I could calculate without new approval was approximately $126. The association was charging $285.
The $159 difference made my stomach drop.