By Robert L. Scott, homeowner representative, McClellan Meadows Community Association (Coolidge, AZ)
What I can document as fact
In June 2023, I asked my HOA’s property management company, AAM, LLC, for a copy of an email I was told had been sent to our Board of Directors. The community manager at the time, Jeanne Tonkinson, had told me in writing that she had “e-mailed the board” about a request I’d made. When I asked for a copy of that email — not for anything new, just proof of what I’d already been told — I was refused. Twice, the same day. No law was cited. No explanation was given beyond “No, sir. I will not.”
Three weeks later, I received a letter from the Association’s outside law firm asserting that emails between board members are not “financial or other records” of the HOA under Arizona law, and are therefore not something homeowners are entitled to see. This is a real, documented position AAM’s attorney took in writing, and I have the letter.
I later obtained an email from AAM’s Vice President of Tempe Operations, dated October 30, 2025, confirming in writing that the decision to hire that attorney and take that legal position was made by “the Board President and Management” — not by a vote of the full Board. Separately, the Association’s current community manager confirmed in writing, after reviewing years of closed-session board minutes, that no record exists of the Board ever voting on or authorizing this.
I have also reviewed our HOA’s own email archive going back to 2018. AAM had, for years, freely sent and forwarded routine emails to homeowners without any objection or legal theory about emails not being records. That practice changed abruptly, specifically, at the exact moment I asked for proof that the Board had actually been told about my request.
These are things I can show in writing. I’m not asking anyone to take my word for it.
What I believe, but cannot prove
Here is where I shift from fact to opinion.
I believe — based on the pattern above, and based on my own account of a Board meeting I personally attended, where board members told me directly they had never seen or been told about the email or the attorney’s letter — that management companies in Arizona can, and sometimes do, control what information actually reaches a volunteer Board of Directors. I believe this may have happened in my own community.
I want to be clear: this is my theory, not a proven fact. I do not have a signed confession or a smoking-gun document proving that any specific person deliberately withheld information from our Board. What I have is a pattern that is consistent with that theory: a management company that repeatedly failed to produce proof it had done what it claimed, a Board that, by its own members’ account to me, said it hadn’t seen key documents, and years of correspondence in which not a single Board member — despite being copied on dozens of emails — ever personally wrote back.
There could be other explanations. Board members are volunteers, and volunteer boards are sometimes simply disengaged or slow to respond to email, independent of anything a management company does. I can’t rule that out. I’m laying out the pattern I see, and I’m telling you plainly that it’s my interpretation of that pattern, not a verified conclusion.
Why I think this matters beyond my own dispute
If a management company can decide what a volunteer Board sees and acts on — even unintentionally, through simple inattention or a habit of “handling things” without checking back — that’s a structural problem, not just a personal grievance. Arizona’s open meeting law (A.R.S. § 33-1804) specifically names “community managers” as parties who must favor transparency, which tells me the legislature has at least considered that management companies could be a bottleneck for information reaching a board. Our HOA’s own bylaws don’t give a management company the authority to decide what information a board receives — that’s not one of the powers a board is allowed to delegate.
Whether that’s what happened in my community is something I believe, based on the record I’ve described above — but it is genuinely a belief, not something I can hand you a document proving. I think Arizona homeowners deserve a clearer legal answer to a simple question: when a management company says it told the board something, and won’t prove it, what recourse does a homeowner actually have?
What I’d ask readers to take from this
If you’re dealing with something similar in your own HOA, ask for the actual proof — not just “the board was told,” but the email, the date, the confirmation. If you can’t get it, that alone tells you something, even if it doesn’t tell you exactly what.