Friday's weekly update included this line, buried in a section addressed to "a few select people" who've been critical of the board: "We do not have the time, nor frankly, the interest, to write our own blogs or engage in running online commentary about every issue."

No, the board doesn't do blogs. It does something else. A weekly mass email to the entire neighborhood, paired now with a new standing instruction that any resident who wants to ask a question or seek clarification should do it privately, one household at a time. That's a far cry from the weekly meetings and open forums promised during the campaign. It's a one-way broadcast with a feedback channel nobody else can see.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have a public forum to discuss these issues with the board directly, which is why I consistently ask the board to live up to its frequent meetings and community town halls campaign promise. Absent regular open meetings, I’ll continue to ask my questions and try to keep the board accountable in this space, since no other public outlet is currently available to homeowners like me.

Here's how Friday's email put it: "To ensure that concerns are properly documented and routed to the appropriate parties, residents are encouraged to direct HOA questions, concerns, and maintenance requests through May Management." That's the channel. One homeowner, one email, to the management company, out of view of everyone else in the neighborhood.

Compare that to the channel the board reserves for itself: a weekly email blast to every household, sent directly from our management company. The board gets to frame the narrative, unchallenged, once a week, to the whole community at once. Homeowners get a private inbox at May Management.

A proper public meeting doesn't work that way. When a homeowner raises a concern, everyone in the room hears the question and the answer, nobody has to ask it twice, and everyone gets to weigh in, building consensus instead of settling for whatever the board decides to tell us afterward. That's the entire value of a public meeting over a private email chain, and it's exactly what's missing here.

And the meetings keep slipping. On August 14th, the board wrote: "We expect to have more information to share at our next HOA meeting, which we are hoping to hold before the end of this month." One week later, on August 21st, the target moved: "We will present this information... to the community at our next HOA meeting, currently anticipated for some time next month." In seven days, "before the end of this month" became "sometime next month." It's the fourth week in a row without a board meeting, and counting.

Meanwhile, the same August 21st email defends the board's own record on exactly this point, pointing to "the regular HOA meetings, weekly written updates, community polls, and ongoing responses to resident questions that have been implemented specifically to improve communication with the community," and adds: "I cannot recall a time when a previous Board communicated this frequently or was this responsive to residents' questions and concerns." There have been just two board meetings since the new board’s first meeting on June 22, both just days from each other in mid-July, and none since. Sending a certain volume of email isn't the same thing as open discussion, deliberation, or accountability in a public forum.

While meetings keep slipping, the board hasn't slowed down on conducting business, it's just doing it in ways that appear inconsistent with Florida statute. Friday's update stated: "Today, the Board met onsite with our structural engineer, a representative from the concrete wall company, and a potential contractor for installation of the Royal Foam product being considered for the front entrance. We intentionally coordinated the meeting so that all parties could be present together to review the project, discuss technical requirements, and address questions directly with one another. The group walked the entire wall, including portions extending through the wooded areas... This was an extremely productive meeting, and the Board came away feeling very reassured about the proposed approach and path forward."

I saw three of the five board members on that walk with the vendors Friday morning on my way home from dropping my high schooler at school. Three directors is a quorum on a five-member board. And the board's own description confirms this was a coordinated gathering, arranged in advance, that produced a shared conclusion that they "came away feeling very reassured about the proposed approach." I'm not an attorney, but that reads like a likely violation of the state's open-meeting requirement for HOA boards: deliberation on association business, conducted with no meeting posted, no 48-hour notice, and no opportunity for a single homeowner to attend or ask a question.

Florida Statute 720.303(2)(a) says a board meeting occurs "whenever a quorum of the board gathers to conduct association business." It doesn't carve out an exception for a walk-and-talk with vendors instead of a conference table. A quorum gathering to review a project, discuss technical requirements, and come away with a shared view of the path forward looks like a likely violation of that statute.

This isn't a one-off. The engineering contract has apparently been signed, with no board meeting to approve it. A budget line for engineering services was approved at the last meeting — but budgeting for a category isn't the same as approving a specific contract, and homeowners never got to see the actual proposal, the contract terms, or the engineer's scope of work before it was signed. Then there are the examples from our last post: the call-box decision, announced before any public board vote was taken. The termination of MEEK, disclosed only after the fact, and the possible termination or settlement with other vendors, apparently negotiated behind closed doors. Individually, any one of these might be explainable. Together, they describe a board that keeps deliberating and reaching decisions between meetings, then simply telling the neighborhood what it decided. Again, that’s a far cry from the transparency promised during the campaign, and uncomfortably close to what this same board accused the previous one of doing.

Set the last four weekly emails side by side and a pattern shows up. Every project except the one the board says is its top priority got a specific, detailed update showing real progress:

The wall and entryway, by contrast, spent those same four weeks in the same holding pattern:

The board does deserve credit for finally producing an estimated project timeline on Friday, but it's clear where the majority of substantive work has actually been happening this past month, and it’s not on the wall and entryway.

The same August 14th email that announced the gate-access decision also included this, from the treasurer's financial review: "we have sufficient reserve funds to complete the planned improvements without depleting our reserves or compromising the Association's financial position." Two sentences later, in the same paragraph, the treasurer "will also be requesting an updated estimate for future road repairs. Our previous estimate is now several years old, and construction costs have likely increased."

The second statement makes it impossible to make the first statement with any confidence. A conclusion that reserves are "sufficient" has to account for the community's next major six figure capital expense, and the road estimate, by the board's own admission, is stale and likely understates current costs. If the number behind one of the community's largest future capital obligations is admittedly out of date, "sufficient" isn't a conclusion yet. It's a placeholder at best.

The board has been firm on one point all summer: no significant change to the wall and entryway design without the two-thirds homeowner supermajority it says is required — the same claim I've pressed the board on before, and the same claim our HOA attorney's opinion doesn't support. From the August 14th email: "We are not considering a significant redesign, including the previous Board's design, without the required supermajority approval of the community."

So here's a question worth asking directly: how does a wholesale redesign and dramatic expansion of the park and fountain lighting not follow the same standard? The park's original lighting was simple ground-level white uplights. What's gone in instead, per the board's own description, is a different system entirely — an "illuminated canopy" effect from uplighting the oak and palm trees, lighting mounted in the trees themselves, color-changing LED fixtures at the fountain, and copper conduit run visibly up tree trunks, chosen, in the board's words, because it will "naturally develop a patina and darken over time, allowing it to blend more naturally into the surrounding landscape." The last detail is a pretty big tell: nobody picks a material for how its patina will look in a few years unless they're making a deliberate design decision, not a repair. Our original lighting system certainly had nothing to patina.

Either the two-thirds standard means what the board says it means, and applies here too, or it's just a rhetorical crutch for blocking anything the board doesn't like — even if a majority of the neighborhood supports it. How else can you defend a rigid adherence to a 20-year-old design and color palette, with the only planned homeowner input being a handful of online polls choosing between the board's own pre-selected options for caps, lighting, or lettering?

There's also a more practical problem. Some of the new fixtures have gone in mere inches from the park's foam columns and other elements the ABS Engineering report already flagged as fatally flawed and in need of complete replacement. Installing anything permanent so close to a future demolition and construction zone isn't just an odd sequencing call. It's the kind of avoidable cost the board says, everywhere else in this project, that it's trying to prevent.

Friday's email closed the wall section with this: "a sincere thank you to the homeowners along the Palm Valley Road portion of the wall who allowed us access to their backyards today, particularly on such short notice. Your cooperation was extremely helpful and greatly appreciated."

I know of at least four homeowners along that same stretch of wall who were never contacted at all. They were not asked for access, not given notice, nothing. They found out about Friday's visit the way most of the neighborhood did: after the fact. A public thank-you that describes cooperation from "the homeowners" isn't accurate when at least a meaningful number of the actual affected homeowners weren't part of it. That's a small thing on its own, but it's the same pattern running through everything above: the version of events that goes out in the weekly email is more polished than what actually happened, crafted to fit a narrative, and further erodes trust at a time when the neighborhood is so deeply divided.

I still do not believe the board is acting in bad faith. I'm guessing this is a bigger job than any of them envisioned when they embarked on the recall effort. The process is time consuming and Florida HOA regulations are cumbersome and onerous. It seems to me this board has decided a tidy public narrative and expediency matters more than the process (and the transparency its own campaign promised). We're starting to see the cracks in that strategy now. But the pattern is consistent: praise its own communication while narrowing where homeowners can actually be heard, reach conclusions in gatherings that appear to meet the standard for meetings but were never noticed as one, value email and polls over public meetings, apply its own design-change standard selectively, and describe its own cooperation more generously than the facts support.

Being busy isn't the same as being transparent. A weekly email is not a meeting. An email inbox at the management company is not public comment. And a board that keeps citing its own communication as proof of good governance should be able to explain why so much of what it does still happens somewhere homeowners aren't invited and can't see.