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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | FEBRUARY 2017 7 By Len Tavernetti, Board President Conditions, Covenants, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) are limitations and rules placed on a group of homes by a builder, developer, neighborhood association and/or homeowner association. They protect the builder, investors and homeowners with a common agreement as to changes, operations or improvements to the development. It is common for developers to re-use the CC&Rs from one development to another, allowing home buyers to tailor them to their specific interests and situations. Four Seasons at Beaumont has made changes to their CC&Rs tightening age restrictions and reducing the number of votes for amendments from 67 percent to a simple majority of the members other than the Declarant (KHov). We are an unusual HOA with such an active membership voting in elections. In our two 2016 elections two-thirds of the membership participated. This participation rate is encouraging the Board that in this upcoming election we can further adapt our CC&Rs to our membership. There will be two amendments on the ballot. One will eliminate the district delegate system. This system is designed for HOAs with poor participation in which a majority of the members of the district do not vote. Under these rules if only 49 percent of the district membership vote, the delegate can cast 100 percent of the districts voting power for any candidate. This negates the votes of those 49 who did vote and is basically undemocratic. Under the proposed change, the Board would still appoint neighborhood representatives to help get out the vote, but they would not cast votes. Candidates would be elected by the total popular vote of the entire HOA. A second amendment would eliminate cumulative voting for Board members. Under the current rules if there are four positions for election, a voter may cast four votes for a single candidate. Such voting skews the popularity of a candidate or a single issue and could place a single issue candidate on the Board making consensus on many other issues difficult. Eliminating this provision would require voters wanting to cast their four votes to allocate them to four different candidates. This should add balance to the Board for many issues. CC&RS CHANGES PLANNED AFTER STRONG VOTER TURN-OUT

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