Homeowner Association Litigation Industry Driving Legislative Agendas For California Property Owners

June 04, 2005

By Marcus Aurelius

Community Associations Institute - California Legislative Action Committee (CAI - CLAC) is the litigation interest lobby group. They live off the maintenece dues and home equity of homeowners in homeowner associations.

CAI-CLAC has also been the driving force behind most of the draconian laws by California politicians that has made homeowner associations the lawsuit foreclosure haven for lawyers and managers.

Following is a news alert that the CAI-CLAC lobbyist Skip Daum sent to the CAI foreclosure evangelists:

CAI-CLAC UPDATE for June 3, 2005

1. CAI-CLAC was honored in Tucson at CAI's national management conference. For the second time in recent years, CLAC was bestowed the "Legislative Action Committee of the Year" award for action taken in 2004 on several fronts, most prominently our persistent and committed action on the delinquent assessment/foreclosure bills . All of CLAC's Chapter Delegates, supporting HOAs and industry leaders, and devoted volunteers should take pride in receiving this national accolade. (However, the fight's still not over... we're active again on a similar measure this year... SB 137 (Ducheny) .)

2. CLAC, ECHO and CACM jointly authored a memo to Senator Denise Ducheny (D-San Diego) regarding her SB 137 on the above topic. The points in the memo are technical but vitally important and we are urging her to accept our proposed amendments. As important is the fact that all three organizations are on the same page with regard to these issues. More later after we meet with Senator.

3. How to conduct HOA elections and members' access to "all" records are on the table next week. SB 61 (Battin), SB 186 (Battin) and AB 1098 (Jones) encompass these issues. We are lobbying multiple provisions in each and new versions will be sent to me this weekend for our response.

4. Also coming up for debate in a hearing is AB 394 (Villines), a bill that has unintended consequences in that it allows individual owners to re-record their title and governing docs after redacting what they may determine to be discriminatory language. Problem: such re-recording "attaches" to other properties in the same development. We're working delicately on this bill.

5. Final note: CLAC wishes to thank each CAI Chapter Executive Director for their constant help in passing the word about CLAC and for participating in our teleconferences and always helping when we visit for a luncheon, etc. And, of course, their chapter newsletters always have space for our CLAC Update. So, thanks to your Exec is your own chapter!

6. We'll have more next week. This week has been hectic as more than 1250 bills were heard on the floors of the Senate and Assembly. Thanks for your continuing involvement and support.

Respectfully,
Skip Daum
Administrator/Advocate
Community Associations Institute-
California Legislative Action Committee