Trounced!

...that is what happened to the reckless spenders formerly on the board of the Desert Shadows II Homeowners Association tonight. 

Tonight was our annual meeting, and for many years these meetings have been relatively serene events. In fact, for the first seven or so years in which I lived in this community, they were attended only by three or four board members, myself, and maybe an extra lone straggler or two from the neighborhood.

That was before the quarterly assessments started drastically rising over the last three years, to a level that now is about double what it was previously. 

What a change! No yawning tonight. This was a room full of one heck of a lot of super-angry people, peeved not only about assessment increases but what they perceived as over-zealous regulation. A lot of the dialog was definitely not rated "G." At one point the property manager felt compelled to move across the room to a seat next to the exit door out of concern for her personal safety. (And no, Mom, it wasn't me who said or did anything that you wouldn't have approved of. There were at least 10 or more who were far more vocal than even I would ever have been, and they said it all for me and then some. But that's not to say I wasn't silently cheering to myself as the crowd laid it on).

In the end, the people spoke. Two extremely unpopular board members, one of whom didn't even have the decency to show up at the meeting, were soundly defeated and ousted, replaced by newcomers who were also very decidedly opposed to the ever-increasing assessments and draconian oversight trends of late and who presented some of the best arguments of the evening. 

If the effectiveness of their actions over the next year comes anywhere close to the effectiveness of their words tonight, we will now be in much better hands. Democracy was in action tonight, and at least for now, justice appears to have prevailed.