the war on Christmas

To recap.

The evil committee of rules and regs, under the cover of obscurity, slipped in a change that mandated that only white lights would henceforth be permitted on the railings of the building.  This happened just before Christmas last year and noticing that the balconies were as usual hosting many strings of multicolored lights and nobody was being fined I thought the board was taking the wise course of not enforcing a stupid rule.

I was awakened from my fool's paradise this spring by announcements in the elevators that this hateful rule was to be enforced by fining offenders.  I took up the sword, went down to the board meeting and made a stink.  To no avail, a rule is a rule was their ruling.  Well what can I do, I asked, can I get up petitions?  Nobody said I couldn't.  So I spent a few days roaming the concourse between the towers about the time that people would be getting home from work.  I approached maybe 150 people and three quarters of them signed my petition asserting that people should be able to have whatever color lights they want on their balconies. 

I sent jpeg copies of the petitions to all the board members, and as a result the subject was placed on the agenda of the next board meeting  I attended loaded for bear and made an elegant presentation and discovered that the board was split on the issue.  When it came up the first time it had been a close vote and some of the members still would be happy to get rid of the rule. 

I tell you it was an odd experience after my presentation to be questioned by board members who were all strangers to me and I didn't know who was for me and who was against me, but in the end the board decided that we would take a survey to discover what the feeling of the people of the towers was.  I felt like I had won because my experience with the petitions had led me to believe that most people were in favor of permitting multicolored lights.

I was allowed to attend a meeting of the rules and regs committee to figure out how to do the survey.  At the meeting I discovered that I was the lone ranger and that they were considering refusing to do a survey at all, contrary to the mandate of the board.  The chairman of the board however decided that a survey would be done.  She wrote the survey herself with certainly no input from me.  When I suggested an addendum to the survey to explain why it was being taken (I hoped that this would prompt a bigger response) my email got no response.

I was surprised when the survey returned that 47 percent of unit owners wanted whites only, and 37 percent of owners wanted multicolored.  Renters however went 64 percent to 24 percent for colored lights, and if the two are totaled a majority of residents favor multicolored.  But the committee has no concern for renters and decided on the basis of the response of the unit owners to come out against making any changes in the rules.  Well they were going to come out against making any changes in the rules no matter what so this was no big surprise.

As to that survey, I discovered that it was not done by person, but by unit, so that owner's votes were multiplied by how many units they owned, and so to say that 47 percent of owners are for white and 37 percent are for multicolored is simply incorrect.

This is but one of many issues I will be bringing up at the meeting next week, or possibly it won't be until next month.  I won't know until next Tuesday, but I will keep you posted.

Whether you like it or not.