DIRTY TRICKS, SNEAK ATTACKS, P.2

Don't expect most unit-owners to be interested in matters other than [those involved in] their day-to-day comfort and [those] they believe directly affect them. Certainly, everybody, understandably, is interested in that. Things like board governance and ethics are the things that might seem too abstract to people but are actually extremely important if you're trying to run a co-op or a condo properly. You can't control everything no matter what you do. I always used to think that if I could only know enough and explain enough, and come up with the right way of presenting something, I could make everything right all around. Some things are just out of your hands.

Should you have kept your finger on the pulse of the building?

One should always do that. And in fact, that was not the problem here. Only a few months before the annual meeting, we, the prior board, held an informational meeting about a plumbing project, which was then our big expenditure, and it was going to cost more than we expected, so this was the bad news we were going to have to present at that meeting — we needed to raise more money, how were we going to do that, and so on. And there was very little objection at the meeting. People asked a lot of questions but it wasn't contentious. Several unit-owners actually thanked me afterward. Our managing agent even said that I seemed to have a lot of rapport with them. Things seemed to be in good shape as far as that went.

What happened was that later these two board members mounted a sneak attack on me. And that's when the whole attitude changed. I lost the finger on the pulse, but not through any fault of my own, but because they used deceitful tactics. I was painted in a really inaccurate manner, but I didn't know about it so I couldn't answer it until the annual meeting [by which time] people had [already] made up their minds. My detractors had circulated a letter behind my back, saying that I had made unauthorized decisions about settling a litigation, which, of course, would be a huge ethical violation, and that was just not true.

Anything else?

I asked some people who had always supported me in the past, "What happened? How could you believe this stuff?" And they said, that it never occurred to them that I hadn't seen this [accusatory] letter. So, when they didn't hear anything from me in response, they just took it at face value.

That's what I mean when I say if somebody pulls a so-called dirty trick like that, something deceitful, something clandestine, it's hard to respond. People got this crazy letter and then they didn't hear anything from me and they assumed, since it was circulated to most of the unit-owners, that I had seen it, and so had the other two incumbents. But the three of us never saw it. Our opponents made sure not to give it to us.

So, in the end, you should always try and evaluate your perspective. Because, what I realized was, it's actually more important to me that I did something beneficial for the condo than that I stay on the board. The price of change was that I lost my seat. But I knew that the legal settlement that we achieved — which was the main thing that our opponents were trying to use to shoot me down — was absolutely crucial.

It seems like a difficult situation; if you had to do it again, was there anything you would have done in terms of trying to find out more about what was going on behind your back?

I probably would. I probably would be more suspicious. Here's a phrase: try to be preemptively suspicious, figuring certain people are out to get me. I would assume even more nefariousness than I did at the time and try to find out if there was something going on.

Okay, so be constructively paranoid.

Yeah, that's good. Constructively paranoid.

For articles going back to 2002, join our Archive >>