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Litigation Update, Snow!, and More by Kevin Wine, Jan 23, 2026, 11:49 PM, reply, branch, edit

Friday January 23rd was supposed to be the showdown on the election lawsuit, but the hearing was adjourned by the court to February 2nd, so we will have to wait another 10 days for the result. The Board, via its insurance company appointed attorney, filed their response on January 8th. I was expecting them to just file a response in opposition, which is what happened with the 2018 election lawsuit, but this time they filed a "motion for clarification". Oddly, it didn't ask for any clarification, and instead was more like a motion for summary judgement, which they called a "motion to confirm the election", but filed it as a motion for clarification. Makes no sense - maybe it's standard procedure and I'm just not familiar - but here it is:

https://savethehill.org/Legal/C-204-25/MotionToClarify.pdf

I intentionally did not add the other candidates as plaintiffs, or the other other candidates as defendants. Their lawyer is trying to exploit this, claiming that my only harm is that they refused to let me vote in person at the November 5th meeting, and all the other claims should be dissolved. I think they are wrong, but I guess they have to come up with an argument of some sort, however illogical it might be.

Since I gave their attorney an extra day to file his response, I got an extra day to file my response to their response, so on January 19th I filed:

https://savethehill.org/Legal/C-204-25/MotionToClarifyOpposition.pdf

For some reason that is still not clear to me, their attorney cited the federal injunctive relief standard, and claimed I didn't meet it of course, instead of the NJ State injunctive relief standard. The federal standard is a little more favorable towards the plaintiff (me), so I don't know why he would use it, but whatever, I'm not an attorney.. lol

I am still very hopeful we will get some relief from the court this time. The evidence is undeniable.

Finally, Some Snow!
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The Board has been very lucky - there haven't been any major snowstorms since the tyrants took over in 2018, so they were spared the embarrassment of a snow removal disaster. It looks like their luck will finally be running out Saturday night.

We still only have one tired old wheel loader, after Tong basically gave away the other two loaders. We finally have a new dump truck, after the yellow dump truck debacle ($58k down the drain), but it's not as heavy as the original truck, which they also threw away a few years ago. I thought the plan was to get a newer wheel loader but instead we ended up getting another pickup truck style plow truck rather than repairing the 2011 F250. It's great to some brand new equipment so I don't want to complain too much, but this all could have been done a little more economically, and we really need to have a backup for the wheel loader.

Hopefully the snow removal goes well. But if it doesn't you should all know that I have been frozen out of the operation, so any disasters are not on me. The Board has been struggling with finding extra labor for the previous storms, but there wasn't much snow so our crew of 4 managed through it somehow. If we really end up with 16+ inches, we are going to need some help to get this cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time. While 4 crew could handle any storm, the problem is that it will take longer, and the longer it takes the longer the window of opportunity for someone to slip and fall and get hurt. Given the insurance situation since the building 2 fire, it seems we should be minimizing our exposure, but I'm mostly ignored.

The Letter from the Board President
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A couple of weeks ago, there was a surprise email message sent by the Board President. I say "surprise", because the Board was not advised about the message or given any opportunity to review it. Even when Tong was dictating the show, the Board would at least go through the formality of reviewing the messages before they went out. I wouldn't care if the messages were strictly informational or facts, but when they start getting into editorial content, I would like to have equal space to respond. While my emails go out to about half the owners, I am probably missing some emails that the association has which I don't have.

The editorial content of the message was relating to the Board's beloved "professionals" again, and claiming that we are now required by law to use only professionals for capital repairs and replacements. This is complete nonsense. There is no such law. There is a new capital reserve funding law, which gets in to how much money is supposed to be squirreled away, but it says nothing about how the repairs should be made or who should make them. So much for claiming to "...provide clear transparency...".

As I have mentioned before, there are deeper political forces behind the capital reserve funding law, which, in my opinion, boil down to yet another scam to separate us from our money. While there are legitimate building structural concerns in general, the intent of the legislation was to prevent another Florida condo collapse scenario in NJ. The problem is we are not the same construction as the building that collapsed, so the structural integrity concerns do not apply in the same way. Furthermore, the law mandates reserve funding formalities for everything, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with building structural integrity (like the roads, walks, irrigation system, clubhouse, playground, tennis courts, trucks, machines, etc.).

This legislation was heavily lobbied for by the NJ "CAI", which has a long history of supporting the condominium industry service providers under the guise of fighting for the owners. The have, temporarily at least, succeeded in getting the NJ Legislature to "juice the pot" of money that associations now have to collect, which will inevitably find its way into the hands of the condo industry service providers via their over-priced contracts. My point has always been that there are alternatives to handling the capital repairs and replacement requirements that would reduce the burden on us owners.

The "Agreements"
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There is no way I can close without mentioning this one - so much of the Board's business is still happening behind the scenes, so if I don't bring it to light, the owners will never know. The Board does not like it when I do that, and wants to enforce confidentially with basically everything it does, whether it is legitimately confidential or not. We are a title 15A NJ non-profit corporation, so almost everything is supposed to be public to the owners.

The most recent behind-the-scenes dust-up is over a new confidentiality agreement, and a new ethics agreement, that the Board leadership tried to force down our throats again last week. It was forwarded to us by our new attorney (Susan Radom was finally fired!!! YAY!) which is now Becker. The confidentiality agreement was a heavily modified version of the one originally reviewed, discussed, and eventually approved by a majority of the board back in July 2024.

At the November 18, 2025 Budget Meeting, it appears that the Board made some kind of a motion to approve the two new agreements. I attended that meeting from work and was pulled away for the first 10 minutes, which I guess is when the agreements were discussed and voted on. I can't find the meeting minutes for that meeting, so I don't know exactly what the motion was, but I can share the allegedly approved agreements:

https://savethehill.org/Legal/2026-1-15_ConfidentialityAgreement.pdf
https://savethehill.org/Legal/2026-1-15_EthicsAgreement.pdf

The new version of the confidentiality was so obnoxious that I, Anthony, and Vincent all refused to sign it. Eventually I responded with a dissection of the agreement and all its problems. Only one paragraph in the agreement had anything to do with confidentiality. Most of the rest of it was a veiled infringement on my (and other trustees') free-speech rights, meant to squash discussion of association matters with the owners, and a setup to make it much easier for them to remove us from the Board. Rather than repeat all the points here, you can read my email in its entirety:

https://savethehill.org/Legal/2026-1-19_ConfidentialityAgreementsResponse.pdf

They can't claim I'm disclosing Board emails, because it's my own email I'm sharing (probably won't stop them from trying).

Kevin