Sounds like the system worked. A private owner who did a bad job setting the rules was corrected by the subsequent owners.
Depends on what you mean worked. The private developer had rules that all of us agreed to live by. The HOA kept trying to pass new rules, far more restrictive. 50% of the BODs quit to avoid being recalled...which mean we had recall elections petitioned for and approved about every other year.
I’ve never met anyone who objected to the rules from the CC&Rs - rules like “no barbed wire”! It was the rules we kept being threatened with, and kept needing to organize and hold recall elections to prevent, that made people mad.
If you didn’t go to the monthly meetings, you wouldn’t know what rules they were developing and trying to approve. And most of us didn’t want to go to monthly HOA meetings just to say, “Leave us alone!”
I was on the final BOD. If we hadn’t won approval to disband the HOA, I was going to try to get an amendment to the CC&Rs preventing any fines or assessments other than for failure to pay normal dues. That would have pulled the teeth out of any new rules. I was also going to try to pass an amendment requiring a public vote by the homeowners before adoption of any rule not in the CC&Rs. But happily, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of disbanding, and our CC&Rs allowed it to be done by majority vote. Some places require a 100% vote...
Actually, from the way the article reads, it appears the lawsuit was over the Association’s denial of the reroofing permit, not over the sign fine.