It does not take much time for a self-serving HOA Board to develop a collective mindset that discourages any participation from members who disagree with the rules and/or practices that the Board adopts over time. In fact, in most of these situations, the Boards have ignored their HOAs' governing documents, State and County laws because these Boards have never read them. Imagine if you can, that the Board of a self-managed HOA has Directors who have full-time obligations elsewhere. They may serve on the Board as voluneers who do not ususally feel that they should have any special skills. However, this assumption is not actually true because the governing documents are ususally only quite specific about the duties of the HOA's officers. Therefore, these sources of information are not too specific about the responsibilities the other directors who can be assigned to handle very important functions such as maintenance of the HOA, communication with members, and deterimining if a member has violated the CC&R or architectural guidelines. Since the State laws and governing documents leave a lot of decisions up to the discretionary authority of the Board, the members themselves have to check these laws carefully in order to stay in control of their Boards; and this is not what members typically expect to do.
Tips about dealing with the Board if you find a discrepancy between a Board's decision and State law are discussed in full in my E-book entitled Crushing The Dual-Class System of Some Self-Managed HOAs, which can be purchased from my website, HOA-Consulting-Services.com. (I find it easier to reach my site from yahoo.com rather that google...but,that is just my preference). If the suggestions from my E-Book do not work, then do not give up because my E-Book covers this possibility too. In addition, if all of your efforts fail, then you can also take your issue to an external source that oversees HOAs in your State. In this situation, if your issue is one that is shared by other members, it is helpful to obtain a petition signed by members so that your voice is one of many that carries more weight if you are contacting your State of local representatives. A Lobbyist Organization in your State is another way to will bring a group's concerns to the State Legislature's attention, or to the County Commission's attention.