• Sen. Winters (R), HOA board she serves on being sued for stopping disabled bus
    12 replies, posted
The family of a child with disabilities is suing Oregon Senate Republican Leader Jackie Winters and the Salem homeowners board on which she serves after it voted to bar the girl's school from providing her with door-to-door bus service. A lawsuit filed in May by Erika Hernandez and Paolo Regalado says the restriction violates federal and state fair housing laws. The parents are asking the court to direct the Golf Course Estates Homeowners Association to allow the school bus back into the subdivision and award unspecified damages and legal fees. They also want the HOA to develop a plan to provide equal access for people with disabilities. The lawsuit names the board and its three members: Winters, Lee Edwards and Lori Gibson. Winters, who was first elected to the Legislature in 1998, is running for reelection this year. According to Hernandez and Regalado, their daughter "has developmental disabilities and attends a special needs school." ... The family moved into Golf Course Estates in February 2017, and the school bus ferried the girl without incident until Oct. 24, 2017, when the mother learned that HOA manager Sharon Bowker told the school district to stop sending a bus to the girl's house, court documents say. Bowker then directed the district to pick the child up on heavily traveled River Road South. ... Another family with a child with disabilities had a similar experience in the subdivision. Christina Pimentel said her son Evan Lewis is autistic and since he cannot ensure his own safety walking to and from a bus stop on the busy road, Evan's Individualized Education Plan always called for door-to-door bus service. The HOA stopped, reinstated and then stopped Evan's bus service at the same time it was interfering with transportation for Hernandez and Regalado's daughter, Pimentel said. Lawsuit Their insurer is clearly not impressed. In a July 18 letter to homeowners obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive, the HOA's lawyer Mark Hoyt says the association's insurer initially declined to pay for their legal defense. What a class-A cunt.
Guess who's hopefully losing re-election? ... Who am I kidding, "people" probably praise this woman for her "bravery". Tragic really.
Yet more proof that A: The GOP is full of toxic selfish fucks and B: HOAs should be banned outright.
Homeowners' associations weren't much of a thing until the 60s to keep black people out of white neighborhoods.
I'd argue they still try to uphold those values
Tayleranne Gillespie, communications director for Senate Republicans, wrote in an email Tuesday evening that the HOA's insurance company has since agreed to cover legal defense costs, and Winters and other board members hired attorney Hillary Boyd with the Portland firm Davis and Rothwell. What is the fucking point in defending this? It is a clear ADA violation. The HOA is going to get its ass handed to it.
HOAs are important its just there's too many high profile cases of them abusing their position. If your neighborhood has a piece of blight leftover from the developer like a 40 acre lake that's dead then you want to have an HOA to hold them accountable.
True, but at the same time I don't want some fuck-wagon telling me what I can/cannot do with my property just because I decided to go with RGB strips instead of white LEDs for Christmas, y'know?
HOAs might have a legitimate theoretical purpose in safeguarding the value of properties in a community. In practice they are almost universally staffed with busy-bodies, whose overriding cause d'etre is to exercise petty control over the people in their community. I try not to make generalizations about groups, but HOAs are not a case of a few high profile cases giving them a bad name. They're corrupt and uselessly aggravating by design, structured in a way that ensures that the people most likely to be put in leadership positions are also the ones with the least to do, and wield unreasonable power with no legal recourse. HOAs are cancer, and I have no regrets over buying a house in a non-HOA community.
if what they're doing isn't illegal and its their property, I could care less. If it's too big of a disruption, I go to my city board, not to some HOA who can selectively enforce their rules.
A community can form a covenant that is a signed contract backed by the state marshal. Our neighbors recently broke it by having a dilapidated deck/hottub that was breeding rats/mosquitos. People called the marshal showing the covenant, and the people were forced to clean their shit up.
I'd rather have a dead 40 acre lake than some nosy fuckstick telling me my grass can't be kept at 3.25" high for no reason other than he likes it at 3". In fact I'd almost pay to have a lake like that installed, because it'd give me somewhere to run RC boats, something I'd love to get into but can't on account of not having access to any waterways on which to run them. Nothing good comes from HOAs. they're about as unamerican as you can get, really. You buy that Suburban home, yet you're not allowed to do whatever the fuck you want with it because someone else doesn't like it? Where's the freedom? What's the point of even buying the home in the first place if you can't do whatever you want with your own property?
Salem is more bipartisan than Portland but I wouldn't underestimate the outcry from this. Outside Oregon's eastern district most Republican voters are largely socially liberal compared to most parts of the country. There's a fair chance that she could've fucked herself over pulling this shit.
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