1. At some point following the 2024 annual meeting on May 30, the three newly elected directors met in what they pretended was a board meeting, but it in fact, could not have been. Dream Lake is organized as both a condominium and as a non-profit corporation, and the respective Michigan laws that govern these two kinds of organizations, along with master deed and two sets of bylaws, have very strict provisions on what constitutes a board meeting, with particular focus on the timely notice of such meetings being given to ALL board members. These provisions on notice to all members are to prevent exactly what happened when these three met. Emily and John were board members and the three never included them in any notice of the therefore pretend board meeting(s) that occurred.
2. The three new board members then took some sort of steps to, in theory, remove Emily and John from their director positions based on an assertion that their holding office was not according to the three's interpretation of the association bylaws at Article III, Sections 2 and 4 (the Association Bylaws are here). There is no authority given anywhere for directors to remove existing directors, even to a real board, had a real board been meeting, and especially not given to a renegade group of only three directors acting as self-appointed vigilantes. A real board has the authority to fill by appointment certain vacancies in some situations, but these seats were not vacant! Therefore the only legal removal would have been by the action of the co-owners in an annual meeting or special meeting.
3. Regarding directors holding office, the above cited bylaws state in part, at Article III, Section 2: " . . . The directors shall hold office until their successors have been elected and hold their first meeting." Again, like above, this language is intended to block exactly what was done here, but it was ignored. Co-owners have the right to be represented by other co-owners of their elected choice in alost every case, not hand-picked cronies of a few. The disgruntled newly-elected three had, as their only real legal recourse, the same option that all co-owners have to question association matters, go to court! The three did NOT do that.
As attorney Jeff Ray told the three after the annual meeting, the resulting situation is now one where nothing the quasi-board has done since legally stands, and the three have put our association in tremendous legal and financial jeopardy as a result. And just to give them a bit more to worry about, hopefully, there probably is a real and serious question of whether the association's board and officer's liability insurance will protect them, as they have done all this flying in the face of contrary legal advice. With any luck the association will end up protected while the individual decision makers may be personally liable without the insurance coverage.
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