Our HOA attorney, Ed Ronsman, has been involved in every step of the entryway wall project. He approved the funding mechanism. He reviewed the design process. He made sure the previous board followed 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 the facts.

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 that was the basis of their legal threats and challenges, which was the 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 vague mumblings about state statutes and governing documents with no specifics . 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 like 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. But modernizing the wall structure or entryway suddenly needs a supermajority because the board does mind it. Remember, our HOA attorney says none of this requires a community vote of any kind. It’s all legal. 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, they've built themselves a false choice with a one-way door. Anything they want happens immediately. Anything they don't want dies trying to clear 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 new board’s erratic trust in our legal counsel. This is the same attorney. The same governing documents. The same statute. He was right enough to cause a sudden change of heart in this new board's position on funding, but somehow he’s wrong and the design he approved for the project is "illegal." Nobody has explained the difference, because there isn't one grounded in the actual facts. Don’t be fooled, this new 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 just plain ol’ deception.

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’re blocking this because we want something different."