The Rule Nobody Read [Opinion]

Nobody Said a Word [Opinion]

For six years, eight solar pathway and landscape lights lined the walk to my front door. Not expensive ones. The kind you push into the dirt and forget about them; they last for a few years and then a trip to my local Lowes and upgrade. They were visible from the street every one of those days. Nobody said a word.

Then the letter came. Violation. Fine.

Nothing about the lights had changed. What changed was who was looking.

I have spent most of my career in governance—as a Marine Corp officer, a government official, a company board chair, and an executive coach focused on how large organizations make decisions. Yet I still received the letter. That is what is worth writing about—not the lights.

Here is the first thing I realized. A rule that goes unenforced for six years is not a rule. It is a preference that eventually arrives as a surprise. Enforcement that appears out of nowhere does not teach a community what the standard is. It teaches the community that the standard depends on who is holding the clipboard this year.

The second thing I realized is more uncomfortable, because it implicates me. I never read the document that governs my own home. The annual policy statement arrives in a thick packet every year. Mine went where most of them go. I coach people on governance for a living, and I did not read my own. If you are honest, neither did you.

That matters more than it used to, because the law moved and almost nobody in this valley noticed.

In June of 2025, the Legislature passed AB 130. It was a housing bill, mostly about permitting. Buried inside were amendments to Civil Code sections 5850 and 5855 that rewrote how associations discipline their members. Fines are now capped at $100 per violation, unless the board makes a written finding in an open meeting that the violation creates an adverse health or safety impact. Members have a right to cure the problem before a hearing is ever held. Boards have fourteen days to deliver a decision. Interest and late charges on unpaid fines are gone.

Attorneys who represent associations — not homeowners, associations — have written plainly that many existing fine schedules are now unenforceable.

And there is an older provision that has been law the entire time. An association may not fine anyone unless its board has adopted a schedule of monetary penalties and distributed that schedule to every member in the annual policy statement. No properly adopted, properly distributed schedule, no authority to fine. Not a reduced fine. No authority.

That is worth sitting with. In a valley with hundreds of associations, the question is not whether the rule was broken. The question is whether the association ever established, in the manner the law requires, its power to punish the breaking of it.

I want to be careful about where this lands, because the easy version of this column is a villain story, and that version is wrong. HOA boards here are volunteers. Retired people, mostly. They serve without pay, take abuse at meetings, and inherit governing documents written by developers who left the desert decades ago. They hand enforcement to management companies whose business model rewards compliance volume, because that is what boards ask them to produce. Nobody designed this system. It accreted.

That is precisely how good rules go bad. Not through malice. Through drift. A rule gets written for a reason. The reason fades. The rule stays. Eventually someone enforces a rule whose purpose no one in the room can articulate, and the community learns exactly the wrong lesson — that the association is something to manage around rather than something to belong to.

I have watched the same failure inside companies for thirty years. The policy that made sense during a crisis in 2011 is still generating paperwork in 2026, and the executive enforcing it has never asked what it was for. Enforcement is the cheapest available form of leadership and the most expensive available form of governance. It buys compliance and it spends trust, and trust is the only currency a volunteer board actually has.

So, three questions, if you own a home in a common interest development in the Coachella Valley.

Ask your board for a copy of its current schedule of monetary penalties. You are entitled to it on request. Ask when it was last adopted and how it was distributed. Ask whether the fine amounts in it survive the $100 cap that has been law since June of 2025.

You may get a clean answer. Some boards here are well run the board and will hand it over the same day. But if the request produces a long silence, you have learned something important and so has your board.

And to the boards themselves, including the ones I am sympathetic to: audit your authority before you exercise it. Ask counsel whether your fine schedule is valid today. Ask whether a rule you are about to enforce has been enforced consistently for the last six years, and if not, ask what enforcing it now actually purchases. Any board that would be embarrassed by that audit already knows the answer.

The lights are a small thing. They were always a small thing. What is not small is a community of neighbors discovering that the rules governing their largest asset have not been examined by anyone in years — and that the examination was always available, to any one of us, for the cost of asking.