Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream,
my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron,
go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the
subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your
smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. So yesterday we had ap Dylan on from
the North State Journal and she's the publisher of her
newsletter More to the story, and we mentioned it that
the Democrats up in Raleigh were doing a press conference
or did a press conference yesterday, and it was a
mock funeral that they did. I mean that's what they
called it. They called it some sort of a funeral
for all the dead bills, like pieces of legislation. Not
people named William, but all the dead legislation that languish
is now in eternity in the in committee they were filed,
They never got committee hearings, they never got discussions, they
never got votes. Woe is the Democrats. Democratic state lawmakers
branded it a bill funeral. This is a piece at
wr L by Laura Leslie. Believe she is their chief
capital correspondent or something like that. She's been there for gosh,
probably twenty years. But the eulogy gave way to a
free wheeling complaint session. There's another word for a complaint session. Yeah,
I'm not going to say it, but you know what
that word is, Okay, But a free wheeling complaint session
for leaders in the legislative minority who lamented wayne bipartisanship
in the General Assembly. Right, this is always funny to me,
Like you're gonna run hundreds of bills in the legislature
when you are in the minority and you don't have
any sense of what the majority is going to be
with you on. So you're gonna run all these bills
and none of them are going to go anywhere, and
you're going to blame it on a lack of bipartisanship.
Could it be? And I'm just spitballing here. I've never
been an elected official, but I'm just gonna throw this
out there as a potential reason is that they don't
agree with your policies. I feel like that might be
the reason they disagree with your proposal. It's not a
matter of bipartisanship. It's that you don't have the votes,
and you either don't know how to count votes, or
maybe you just don't know how to count. But I suspect,
I'm gonna be charitable, don't know how to count the votes.
Because if you can count votes ahead of time, then
why bother submitting the bill? Because if you know there
are not votes for your particular bill, then why even bother? Oh,
unless of course you want to hold a news conference
at the end of the bill filing period and lament
how the Republicans vote here hundreds of our bills, even
though hundreds of your bills were garbage and they did
not and they did not have majority support. Right, it's
not a matter of them not hearing you. It's a
matter of them disagreeing with you. Also going to throw
this out there too, This is just another idea I'm having.
But time is limited. We actually mark this with like
things called seconds and minutes and hours and days and
weeks and months and years and all of that. And
these are finite periods of time. And so when you
load the agenda with a thousand bills, you don't have
the time to actually hear every single bill. You can't
do debates on every single bill that gets filed, because
anybody can file a bill, and people file really stupid ones.
And when Republicans file stupid ones, they make the news.
Democrats file a ton of stupid ones too, they never
make the news. The memorial quote unquote, which a news
conference in reality, was for the seven hundred and seven
proposals filed by Democrats this year that never received a
single committee hearing before the legislative deadline to pass their
chamber of origin. So this is you've heard me talk
about crossover. This is it's not music related, although maybe
sometimes if it's like state song or something. But no
crossover means bills filed in the House have to get
through through committees, through the House vote, and sent over
crossed over to the Senate, and the Senate filed bills
have to do the same. They have to cross over
by the deadline, and that's the crossover deadline, and that
already passed, and so if it doesn't cross over, then
the bill is basically dead. However, however, there is another
way that you can still get stuff done if you
have the votes. Once again, there's that thing having the votes. Right,
it's called well, they call it gut and amend. That's
what the legislators and the media call it, gut and demand.
I prefer gutt and stuff because it sounds better. So
you take a bill that's already crossed over, you gut it,
like you rip out all of the all of the
language of the bill that passed, and you stuff it
full of another bill completely unrelated maybe, and then it
has to get debated again and agreed upon again and
voted on again and all that. So there is a
way to do that. Very difficult if you were in
the minority, because once again you don't have the votes
to pull a gut and stuff all right.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: On the numbers, I was informed by a person who
works up at the legislature that the numbers are actually
thus oney. Eleven House bills were filed, two hundred and
sixty four were passed by the House. There are three
hundred two House bills still sitting in the House Rules Committee.
About sixty six of those bills are gop bills. Okay,
so it definitely it definitely seems like Democrats filed a
metric buttload of bills that had no chance of going anywhere.
And I'm not one to ascribe motive, but it is
pretty convenient. Now they have a press conference of a
funeral for all their dead bills. So the chambers passed
hundreds of GOP backed bills before the crossover deadline. Both
chambers Democrats introduced real solutions. According to Senator Lisa Grafstein,
a Democrat from Wake County, she of the really weird
colored hair. She says, they introduced real solutions for fixing
what ails us in state government, hiring critical staff, cutting
red tape, investing in the infrastructure behind state services. But
Republicans actually didn't want to fix it, or, as I
suggested earlier, it's possible they disagreed with your proposals and
there's not enough time to hear them all, and you
don't have the votes to pass them, so why waste
everybody's time. Five months into the session, state lawmakers have
only sent one bill so far to Democrat Governor Josh Stein.
That was the disaster relief bill, which was signed into
law in March. Now they've also the legislators have also
been working on the budget, and they do a two
year budget. It's a very big budget. It's like twenty
five billion dollars or whatever it is. It's large or no,
it may be over thirty now, yeah, I think it's
over thirty billion. So that's the primary focus of the
long session. They do a whole bunch of work and
then you know, crossover deadline. They're not done. They're going
to be going for another couple months here. Senate Democratic
Leader Sidney Batch called the session one of the most unproductive,
ineffective legislatures in modern history, which is surprising because I
would think, is the minority party that disagrees with the
majority party, you wouldn't want them to do a lot
of stuff. Right, The fewer bills they actually pass, I
would assume, the happier you would be. Why would you
be demanding that they do Oh, you're demanding they do
stuff you want them to do. Well, there's a there's
a way to go about getting that stuff done is
for you to win. Batch said that the Senate has
taken more bills on social issues this year than ever before.
See so it's not enough, while also being too much.
Thank you Sidney Batch for that clarity. She also represents
Wait County and too many bills and not enough bills.
All right, So spring is here, a time of renewal
and celebrations. You've got graduations, weddings, anniversaries and the special
days for mom and dad. Your family's making memories that
are going to last a lifetime. But let me ask
you are all of those treasured moments from days gone by?
Are they hidden away on old VCR tapes, eight millimeter films,
photos slides? Are they preserved? Because over time, these precious
memories can fade and deteriorate, losing the magic of yesterday.
At Creative Video, they help you protect what matters most.
Their expert team digitizes your cherished family moments and transfers
them onto a USB drive, freezing them in time so
they can be enjoyed for generations to come. I urge
you do not wait until it's too late. This spring
celebrates your past. Is it Creative Video today and let
them preserve your legacy with the love and care that
it deserves. Creative Video Preserving Family Memories since nineteen ninety seven.
Located in mint Hill, just off four eighty five, Mail
orders are accepted to get all the details that create
a video. Dot com got a message here, It's a
peat mail from Stan who says, on this hump day,
I know we're only halfway through the work week, but
this situation couldn't feel more right, and I feel a
good one coming on. Does this ever happen to you? Pete?
Enjoy the show? No? I no, you can't play it
any other time except for the Friday as I'm you know,
rolling out of here. And honestly, it does make a
little bit more sense, like to close out a three
to six, you know, because like the six o'clock going
into right up at six o'clock, you know, five p
forty five timeframe, most people getting off of work at
that time. Yeah, but now I'm all my calendar is
all out of whack, which is weird given my last name,
even though it's not the same spelling. But it's all
out of whack because I was off on Monday, and
so I keep feeling like today is Tuesday.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So anyway, talking about some Raleigh action or inaction, which
is what Democrats want but don't want all at the
same time. But there is a bill that actually went
through the Senate forty seven to zero, a bipartisan bill.
The thing that Democrats said doesn't happen, actually happens. It
actually happens quite regularly. This bill was approved in the
Senate forty seven to zero. The bill, moving through the
North Carolina General Assembly, could limit the power of Homeowners'
Associations across the state or hoa's or as I call them, hoa's.
Senate Bill three seventy eight, passed forty seven to zero,
now heads over to the House. If approved, the bill
would place a cap on HOAH fines. So if you're
in violation for something and the HOA finds you for
it first, that usually they give you, well they should
give you the opportunity to correct the issue right and
then if you don't correct it, then you get brought
into a hearing, and the HOA board holds a hearing
and then they make a ruling if you're in violation,
and then they start assessing fines and people are like,
I'm not going to do that, or maybe it's an
absentee landlord or something, and so they don't show up
for the hearing. Maybe it's a tenant that is in
violation or something, and it starts racking up fines. And
this would put a cap on the fines because people
could end up owing thousands or even tens of thousands
of dollars to the HOA, and then they could put
a lean on the property. So if you try to
sell the house, then you would have to pay off
the fines first. And so you could conceive of a
situation where somebody has been racking up fines for years
and years and then they go to sell and they
can't sell the house for more than the fines. It
would also prevent foreclosures. It would ban for closures over
unpaid HOA fines, so the HOA could not basically seize
your property. Now, I like the idea, the concept behind
this stuff, because I imagine you could have some completely
out of control HOA boards. I've never had, well, let's
put a pin in that one. I've never had a
resident controlled HOA board that behaved in this kind of
a way. So I don't know what that process would
look like. The only thing that I ever got in
trouble for I've lived in two hoa's, one currently, one
previously and the previous one. Like they said, you got
weeds in your yard, and so I went out and
pulled weeds in my front yard and that was it.
Current hoa, we got a warning because my garbage cans
were on the side of the house and they were
visible from the street. And that is a no. No,
you're not allowed to have good We are not allowed
to produce garbage. We get the cans, we pay for
service and all of that, like the garbage collection. However,
you're not allowed to let anybody know that you actually
generate trash in your house. So you have to screen
the garbage cans from view. They can't be visible from
your neighbor's house, they can't be visible from the street.
So basically you got to put them in like a
garbage can corral, and there are specifications for what that
is supposed to look like. Or you could put them
in a shed. Haha. No, you can't put them in
the shed because sheds are banned too, So you got
to put them in your garage. And that's where my
garbage cans live. They live in the garage, which also
requires us to put the little wall plug ins to
keep it fragrant in the garage because otherwise in the summertime, yeah,
it would get pretty bad at any rate. I can
see how these the fines in the foreclosures. I can
see why or how rather that would that would be
abused by out of control HOA boards. However, there's another
side to this, which is how do you get people
to comply with things, like when they are in gross violation,
Like somebody has piled up a whole bunch of like
dilapidated vehicles in the front yard and that just happens
to be next door to you. Right, they're running a
junk yard basically in their front yard, and that's against
the rules. So they would start getting fines, but now
you can never actually force them to correct the behavior, right,
So there's the other side of this issue. It also
this legislation would also ban hoas from finding people who
run home businesses like music lessons or tutoring services, which
I feel like that's appropriate, Like you should not be
you should not be prevented from offering piano lessons in
your house, Like that's as long as it's not at
like three in the morning and can be heard by
all your neighbors, Like that's you can't be banning that
kind of stuff. However, there are parts of this bill
I think that don't go far enough. All Right, if
you're listening to this show, you know I try to
keep up with all sorts of current events, and I
know you do too. And you've probably heard me say
get your news from multiple sources. Why well, because it's
how you detect media bias, which is why I've been
so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's
a website, and it combines news from around the world
in one place. You can compare coverage and verify information.
You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news,
slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too.
I started using ground News a few months ago and
more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate
because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered
and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which
stories get ignored by the left and the right. See
for yourself check dot ground, dot news, slash pete. Subscribe
through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription.
I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to
every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast,
but it also supports ground News as they make the
media landscape more transparent. Talking about out of control Hoah's
Hoa's legislation moving through the general Assembly right now would
seek to rain them in and their abuses, from banning
foreclosures over unpaid fines, placing a cap on those fines,
banning hoas from finding people who run home businesses like
music lessons or tutoring services. And according to Charles Williams
with the North Carolina Citizens for HOA Reform, the state
still has a long way to go, but he says
this is a step in the right direction. He said, quote,
there is not a single agency in this state that
has oversight of the HOA industry. So if you have
a problem, there's really no place as a homeowner for
you to go. We have some of the weakest HOA
laws in the country. Anybody who has done battle with
an HOA in North Carolina knows this. There is nowhere
to go. Let me get to Greg real quick here. Hello, Greg,
welcome to the program.
Speaker 3: Hey yeah, good question.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 3: I'm in real estate and if I managed property, you
have to have a real state license be a broker
in charge. There's no law that requires does has changed
the law that requires HOA management company to have a
broker in charge so that there's some recourse that you
could go to the North Carolina Real Estate Commission.
Speaker 1: If you have a problem, I don't know. I don't
know if if that is in this bill, I can
go check. I don't remember seeing it. Yeah, I mean
it's like twelve pages long. I read it a couple
of days back. I don't recall seeing anything about that.
But that's not to say that it wasn't in there
or doesn't it. And you're saying that this does not
exist at the moment.
Speaker 3: No, anybody off the street could just start an HOA
management company and if you can talk at HOA management
board to hire you, right, And and then that's why
you get so many letters, because they make money by
each letter.
Speaker 1: So that has not been my experience there. We're actually
our h OA is now abandoning it because it's too expensive, right,
It's too expensive to the homeowners that are paying for
the postage. It's a separate line item in the budget.
And the more letters that they send, and especially in
a neighborhood as big as mine, I don't know. Do
you live in an HOA now now much better?
Speaker 2: Right? No?
Speaker 1: I understand that. But part of the problem in North
Carolina is that a lot of builders believe that they
have to do hoa's as part of a Planned Community
Act provision in existing law, and they don't have to,
but they do it so they can maintain total control
during the build. And that is because when you're building
a neighborhood, the builder is the HOA.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I work for a builder.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that to me is a huge problem. That's
that's been my experience that that is a huge problem
because the builder then can make mistakes, do shoddy work,
and then offload the costs of repairing to the homeowners
when they should have been the ones held accountable. But
because it's them, they're not going to hold themselves accountable
unless they choose to.
Speaker 3: My boss made a new neighborhood and she bought the
first lot and she cut it out of the neighborhood
so it wouldn't be intohoa. Wow, she ran too.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable actually, very believable in this state. Very believable. Yeah, Greg,
I appreciate the call. I'll take a look and see
about the real estate. Say license, I'll take a look.
Next up is Gary Hello, Gary, Hello, Yo, what's up.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm dealing with hoa's. I found something that shut
them up and made them leave me alone. I found
out that the HOA whenever it was established, did not
complete all of its paperwork all those years ago, and
so the state threatened to shut down the HOA. And
so that's something that if people have problems with hoa's
they might want to check into.
Speaker 1: That's I'm assuming you're talking about the declaration.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, yeah, the HOA itself, whenever it filed with
the state to be an entity, they did not complete
all the paperwork.
Speaker 1: So that was that the builder or was that when
homeowners took over?
Speaker 4: When homeowners took over?
Speaker 1: Okay, so right, so the builder had the paperwork and
set it all up, and then the paperwork for the
turning over to the resident controlled HOA board, that's where
they messed up, right, Yeah, so not the declaration, got you? Okay,
Well that's a good lead if if you're having problems, Yeah,
take a look at the original paperwork. So this to
me is why I say that this bill And thanks
for the call, Gary, I appreciate it. It's a good tip.
But yeah, you got to have all the documentation. You
got to if you're in an HOA neighborhood, you've got
to have all of the documentation saved onto a personal
file or a cloud whatever, but you got to you
got to know it all, all the original documents, because
things get said in the neighborhood and among residents and
by the board, and things just become sort of like
accepted as the truth. And then you find out years later, no,
that's not true. Oh there actually isn't a rule that
governs this thing. That everybody thought there was a rule
saying you couldn't do this sort of thing, and turns
out there isn't a rule. Because it's usually it's very
hard to change what's called the CCRs, the codes, covenants
and restrictions right that you you usually need like two
thirds of the neighbors to vote for some sort of
a major change to your CCRs, and so it's very
difficult to do. So a lot of boards will try
to get around it. And as you might imagine, if
the board is still controlled by the builder in a
new neighborhood still under construction, and they're like, we'll turn
it over when seventy percent or eighty percent of the
units are sold, and then they'll start turning it over.
But they don't have to set it at seventy percent.
They can set it at one hundred percent, and that
neighborhood could take a decade to build. And so residents
never get control over that board. And that board is
basically controlled. It is controlled by the builder, and then
the builder can change the rules however it chooses, and
they're only required to have one meeting a year for
their budget quote ratification of the board by the board.
Home owners don't get a vote on it, but they
have to have a meeting. So they show you here's
the spending. And here's a little secret I learned. They
keep the HOA assessment levels, the dues, they keep them
low while they're selling their units, and then when they're gone,
you find out you don't have any money because they
haven't been funding for all the maintenance. This is a
big problem. Here's a great idea. How about making an
escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western
North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and
Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary,
a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal,
or get family and friends together for a big old reunion.
Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where
you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things
that truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand
acres of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a
serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Centrally located between Asheville and the entrance of the Great
Smoky Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion
and proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces,
aircar conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi grills, outdoor tables and
your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages,
two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms.
Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for
any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call her
text eight two eight, three six, seven seventy sixty eight
or check out all there is to offer at Cabins
of Aashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime.
All right, let's go over to the phones though and
talk to Mark. Hello, Mark, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Hey Pete, how you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm all right, how are you good?
Speaker 2: Good? I call uh just tuned in and called the
fact that there's some legislation moving through North Carolina. But
I wanted to give you a little perspective on South Carolina.
All Right, I'm right across the border. I live in
an h I live in a neighborhood where the developer
still controls the HOA because he's still building out right,
and he has not followed his own bylaws. He went
two or three years without sending out any financial statements
to to the to the residents, and so we began to,
you know, complain. Of course, we signed, We got a
neighborhood petitioned up for him to follow his own bylaws.
Long story short, there's not a lot of recourse at
the state level. We went all the way to the
Attorney General's office, and he falls under HOA. Developer h
a's fall under the non Profit Act in South Carolina,
which simply says, you know, you have to act on
in fiduciary duty if you run a nonprofit and you
have to respond to the people that benefit from the nonprofit.
Problem is, there's no teeth in the law in the
Act that says, well, what if you don't do that,
what if you breach your faibuciary duty. So the end
result was we were told get a lawyer, and so
it really is ranked with potential for abuse and we're
suffering it right now. Oh yeah, we do have a
lawsuit against against this developer. Can't go into a lot
of detail about that. Sure, it's not an easy route, Pete.
It is not easy.
Speaker 1: No. And that's the other thing too, is the litigation
that you have to pursue. You are just residents. You
just have to band together and take up a collection.
You can't even use HOA funds. You're not even an entity.
You're not an HOA. So like, who's the client in
that lawyer customer relationship? Right, you have to raise the
money yourself.
Speaker 2: I'm assuming you're exactly right. We banded together. We got captains,
you know, captains in the neighborhood, so to speak, door
to door because I could money. It's just a lot
of work and even today it's moving through the system.
They've challenged us, they said, you know, each individual has
to sue them directly. Our lawyers argue that we're a
class action, and I think the last I saw we're
getting approved to be that with right, Thank goodness, you know,
because then we'd really do on on the ropes if
we each had to sue directly. But yeah, anyway, just
wanted to share that, and you know, I just feel like, oh,
I'll give you this too. So the legislature said, Okay, well,
we realize there's a lot of problems with hoa's, and
we're going to create a you know, we're gonna we're
going to create a hotline with a consumer affairs department
in South Carolina for people to register complaints with their
hoa's and then we'll use that to inform us on
future legislation. Which that was five years ago. MERGYA has
just they've had tons of issues down there. Uh and
so really it's just to kick the can from what
we can tell, you know, with the legislature. But it's unfortunate.
Hopefully they'll learn something from what may be happening in
North Carolina.
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah, And here's the other thing. When you're
dealing with a legislature that is packed with people who
have to run for election, they get campaign contributions, and
they usually get most of them from the developers that
are benefiting from the lack of oversight and controls.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean the whole thing. You think about everybody
that benefits from pro development, and you know there's bankers
and mortgage companies and real estate agents and builders and construction,
and so you weigh all that in and people are like, well,
we don't want to handcuff development. I mean, we're very
pro development.
Speaker 1: Same here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're right, that's that's what's your up against. Yeah, okay, all.
Speaker 1: Right, well good yeah, good luck to you. Mark. Yeah,
I know the I know the feeling Ralph was calling.
I think Ralph's I saw on the board that he
had a comment about the Palisades. That's sort of the
poster child in Charlotte for this kind of uh, these
kinds of problems.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They they laid in a road if I recall correctly,
and the developer did and then didn't maintain it. And
then a lot of times the builders will they will
not fund the reserve accounts, and if they do, they
draw them down so rapidly when they fix everything on
their way out the door. So they get their bonds
back because whenever they start building, they got to get
bonds with the city, and then they want the bonds back.
So in order to get the bonds back, the city
has to approve it. But the homeowners are not included
in any of this process. They don't have to be included.
As long as they pass the city checklist, then that's fine.
And then they get their bond back and they're gone.
And then you realize, oh, they haven't fixed all of
this stuff, and that means the you have to tap
into reserves. Oh but they haven't funded the reserves or
they drained them. See this is like, yeah, this can
be cataclysmic, like bankruptcy territory for Hoa's all right, that'll
do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
so if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you heard it here. You can also become a
patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.