Preface
The best thing--and the worst thing--about community-association living is The Rules.
Rules do more to enhance property value and promote community harmony than any other factor. Rules also do more than anything else to enhance negative coverage on the evening news and create division in a community.
In this book, we'll attempt to do away with the worst thing--and promote the best thing--about community living by showing you how to look at your rules from a new perspective. We have intentionally omitted sample rules and boilerplate language from this book because, in order to reinvent rules, community association leaders must start with a blank page. However, Chapter six does illustrate our points with detailed discussions of six of the most challenging rules.
In order to help you fill in your blank page:
- We're going to ask you to look at the rules you already have and decide if they're reasonable and necessary.
- We're going to ask you to look at the way you apply those rules and again decide if you're being reasonable. Community association leaders sometimes seem to think that making exceptions to the rules or being flexible in their application equates with a failure to carry out their duties to the association. We hope to show you how to achieve a balance.
- We're going to ask you to look at the way you develop new rules and figure out if you're on the right track.
- We're going to ask you to look at your procedures and consider ways to make sure they're as reasonable as they are legal. No, you don't need to be a judge to do this.
- We're going to ask you to look at the cost to the community--in dollars and in sense--of battling with residents instead of being flexible and fair.
- We're going to ask you to think in new terms--literally--so that the worst thing about community association living can be forgotten. We've made it a point in this book to avoid words like "enforce," "penalty," "punishment," "power," and other words that have harsh or unnecessarily negative connotations. Yes, it's just semantics, but words have the power to create paradigms--and these particular words have created the policing paradigm, at worst, and the parenting paradigm, at best, that have been so problematic for community associations.
- And, above all, we're going to ask you to be reasonable in everything you do in governing and managing your community association--especially where rules are involved.
That's how you reinvent the rules--by being reasonable.
As you might have noticed, the importance of being reasonable is central to this book. Indeed, the inspiration, jumping-off point, and guiding star for Reinventing the Rules is a CAI book with the very title, Be Reasonable: How Community Associations Can Enforce Rules Without Antagonizing Residents, Going to Court, or Starting World War III, by Kenneth Budd. Another influence, equally important, is Drafting Association Rules, by Gurdon Buck.
Standing on the shoulders of these formative works, the challenge became reinterpreting the basic principles behind The Rules within the context of what it means to be reasonable. It's a challenge that every community association faces today, and one that must be met if we truly want to put our communities first.