Our HOA attorney has been in the room for every step of the entryway wall project. He approved the funding mechanism. He reviewed the design process. He made sure the previous board stayed inside the governing documents, the bylaws, and Florida Statutes the whole way through. He sat in the room and on Zoom in public meetings to answer homeowner’s questions. That's not a controversial statement. It's just what happened.

So here's the part that doesn't add up. The new board now says they agree with him on the funding mechanism — the same funding mechanism they spent months attacking, which was the whole subject of my last piece.

But in the same breath, the same board turned around and rejected his advice on the design of the wall. Their reasoning? A 2/3 supermajority vote of the entire association is required before any changes can be made to the original design. When you ask them where that requirement comes from, you get silence.. It's an assertion, repeated with enough confidence that people assume someone must have checked.

Nobody checked. Or if they did, they aren't sharing it. And once you notice that, the word "illegal" stops meaning anything legal at all. It just means the board doesn't want it.

This inconsistency showed up in public at their first meeting. A homeowner asked the obvious follow-up: if design changes need a supermajority, does swapping out ornamental elements and toppers require one? The board's answer was no — those changes don't need a 2/3 vote.

So changes are fine, except when they aren't. And nobody on the board will say where that line sits.

That's because there isn't a legal line. There's a preference. A swapped-out ornamental piece is fine because the board doesn't mind it. Removing linear feet of wall, changing the footprint, or modernizing the entryway suddenly needs a supermajority because the board does mind it. Run that test on every objection they've raised and it holds up every time. The vote requirement isn't a rule. It's a way of saying "we don't like this" in a way that sounds official.

A 2/3 vote of the entire association has never been reached in ten years of debate over this wall. Not once. So when the board sets that as the bar for any design decision they personally dislike, while reserving the right to approve whatever they do like with a simple board vote, they've built themselves a one-way door. Anything they want happens immediately. Anything they don't want gets buried under a threshold nobody ever clears.

It's a veto dressed up as due process. Strip away the legal language and the message is simple: what the board likes, the board approves. What the board doesn't like gets called illegal and handed off to a vote that everyone in this community already knows will never happen.

The part that should bother every homeowner, regardless of which side of the wall debate you're on, is the selective trust in legal counsel. This is the same attorney. The same governing documents. The same statute. He was right enough to reverse the board's position on funding, but somehow wrong and "illegal" on design. Nobody has explained the difference, because there isn't one grounded in the actual documents. Watch what actually happened: the board didn't evaluate his advice and find a flaw in it. They checked whether they liked the outcome. On funding, they did, so he's a credible attorney. On design, they don't, so he's suddenly wrong and his advice is illegal. That's not a legal disagreement. That's a preference wearing a law degree it didn't earn.

If the board wants to make the case that a supermajority really is required, they can start by pointing to the governing document section or cite the specific statute that supports their position. Include an opinion from an HOA attorney that refutes the opinion already given by our HOA attorney. Until then, every homeowner reading this should feel free to do the translation themselves. When this board says "illegal," read it as "we don't like it." When they say "requires a 2/3 vote," read it as "we want to block this without saying so directly."