Carefree Unity recently filed a public document request (by statute, an ‘examination’ request) to the North Boulders Homeowners Association (BHOA) for documents relating to BHOA compliance with Arizona Open Meetings laws. To ensure it was properly drafted, we hired an attorney to prepare appropriate language and deliver the request on our behalf. The BHOA declined to provide the requested documents on the grounds that they could not verify we were entitled to them and asked for the individual names of our attorney’s clients.
We know the Board follows our website (https://carefreeunity.com/), and believe they understand Carefree Unity is a group of more than twenty former Directors of the BHOA. We further believe they can reasonably conclude that at least some of us must be current BHOA residents (in fact, more than twenty of us are).
By policy we act as a group, avoid personal attacks, and do not publish the names of individual members. Our reason for adopting this policy was to try to break free of the personal attacks and character assassinations that we believe have often replaced rational discussion in our community. While we did not verify the BHOA response wording was intentional, we are quite suspicious of any request to identify all our members.
We are disappointed in the Board’s refusal, then, both because we believe they are reasonably certain we are entitled to disclosure by statute, and also because there is no legal prohibition to sharing the information even with non-residents in the public interest if they wish.
Of course, we do wish to resubmit the request, but in a way that doesn’t violate our policy against identification of individual members. A resident of the BHOA, not a member of Carefree Unity, has stepped forward to re-submit our request in his own name. We thank him for doing this in the interests of all BHOA residents and look forward to reporting on this further as information becomes available.
Carefree Unity 