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2022 Legislative update #4
1/15/2022
The first week of the 2022 legislative session has been completed with a total 790 bills introduced to this point, 6 of which directly relate to HOA or Condominium issues. One of these bills is our bill HB-2158 See Bill Here which is the introduced version of my freedom of speech and assembly bill. The original language I presented to all of you a couple months ago was totally rejected by the HOA industry trade groups and the sponsor decided to present a bill more in line with prior versions of this bill introduced in 2020 and 2021. An amendment to this bill is in the works because the HOA industry refused to provide their input on the bill until it was too late as a delay tactic to try and keep the bill from being introduced. This bill will ensure that all homeowners are allowed to post association specific political signs in support or opposition to board candidates or recall votes for board members or for any ballot initiative for the community. You will be allowed to post those signs from the time the association distributes ballots to the members until three days after the election. The bill will also allow homeowners to use community property to assemble other homeowners to discuss community matters and issues. You will also be allowed to invite non-member political candidates or subject matter experts to speak to you relative to those community matters or issues. An important aspect of this bill is the ability to post notices of these informal, informational, or organizational meetings on any association bulletin board. While this is a far cry from the original proclamation of your fundamental rights to free speech and assembly it is a still a significant affirmation of your rights to actively participate in the governance of your communities and to make your voices heard in your community without the oppressive tactics of boards and community managers to suppress your voice and your ability to communicate the truth about community issues counter to the propaganda distributed by the community board or community managers.
Any and all of you that have a validated accounts on the Legislature’s web site azleg.gov should post a position in favor of this bill in the Request to speak program on that site. Use the “my positions” menu item on the left side of the home page for the Request to Speak program. Do not use the “my request” menu option that can only be used when a bill is included on a committee agenda for hearing. I’ll let you know when it is appropriate to use that feature to express your opinion to the committee members directly.
The second significant bill was introduced by Representative Weninger as HB-2275 See Bill Here. This bill will require that for a condominium to be terminated it will require 100% of all unit owners to agree to that termination. While this may seem excessive in reality the current law allows a condominium to be terminated by only 80% of the owners, but in doing so transfers title to all unit and all common property to the association. This is fundamentally wrong because when you buy into a condominium you own your unit and a proportional share of all the common property, how can 80% of the unit owners decide that you no longer own your unit or your share of the common property. This bill was a long time coming and finally addresses the fundamental concern with this statute, I tried to get the sponsors to address in 2019 and 2020 when the introduced legislation to provide fairer compensation for the involuntary displaced homeowners.
We again need all of you to post a position in favor of this legislation on the Request to speak program of AZleg.gov.
The remaining bills are the typical specific issue bills introduce by legislators that do absolutely nothing to improve or assert the fundamental rights of homeowners or to make these communities better places to live. I’ll introduce them here for you information only and you can do what you want with these bills. Personally, I believe that they are a total waste of time but unfortunately these are the only types of issues that any legislator will sponsor because truly meaningful legislation is too hard to get past the trade groups highly paid lobbyist. The presence of this type of bill every session make it harder for me to get any legislator to sponsor any of my legitimate bills.
HB-2010 First responder flags; Homeowners’ associations
HB-2131 HOA’s artificial grass ban prohibition
HB-2149 Homeowners’ associations, military flags
SB-1102 Homeowners’ associations; solar; water devises
To all new members the greatest tool available to you to get your voice heard by the legislators is the AZleg.gov website Request to speak program. To use that tool, you must have a validated account for that web site. While you can create an account online from your homes it must be validated by signing into that account on the kiosk at the Capital only. As a service to our members from across the state I will validate your account for you whenever I’m physically at the capital in this way.
- Create your account on AZLEG.gov with your email address as your user name. Use the temporary password of password all lower case.
- Write me at AzHOAtruth@gmail.com to tell me that you created the account
- I’ll validate your account for you when I’m at the statehouse.
- I’ll inform you that your account is validated and ask you to change your password to one only you will know and can remember.
Thank you
Dennis Legere
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Our Mission:
To advocate, protect, support and advance the best interests and rights of all Common Interest Community members.
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