GraceAbounds
Well-Known Member
Palmer Ranch homeowner and association clash over Web site
What he calls liberty, they call a breach of community rules
By BILL HUTCHINSON
bill.hutchinson@heraldtribune.com
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SARASOTA COUNTY -- Kamel Zaki has lived in nearly a dozen countries and found something to disagree with, he admits, in every one of them.
But the first place he has been officially threatened for expressing an opinion is Palmer Ranch.
Zaki is at odds with the homeowners association in his 254-home community called The Hamptons, which wants to prevent him from sponsoring a Web site he calls HamptonsNBC.
As suggested by what those initials stand for -- Neighbors for a Better Community -- Zaki, a former president of the homeowners association, has some issues with how The Hamptons is being run these days.
"Grievances and propaganda" is how the association's attorney described the Web site's content, in a certified letter Aug. 9 demanding that Zaki cease any use therein of the trademarked name The Hamptons.
But because it is hard to complain about something without identifying it, and because Zaki felt there was a First Amendment principle involved, he ignored the letter.
Last week, the association's property manager gave him until the end of the month to rename the Web site, dissolve it or face a $100-a-day fine, eventually resulting in a lien on his home.
Zaki, a retired Chase bank executive who left his native Egypt more than 30 years ago because of "the politics," is outraged by what he sees as an assault on his freedom of speech.
"Where are we?" he asked. "This is America, still, is it not?"
As it pertains to homeowners associations in Florida's deed-restricted communities, however, the answer appears to be only a qualified yes.
In the absence of any specific regulatory oversight by the state, legal disputes involving homeowners associations tend to end up in civil court, where the sanctity of the deed restriction is typically upheld.
Zaki is willing to gamble as much as $10,000 on hiring legal representation to contest the fine and the Web site ban, but his wife, Eugenia, is nervous, because, as she says, "this is Florida," and "you never know."
Besides, "it's so beautiful here," she says, gesturing toward the man-made lake rippling in the breeze just beyond her pool. "Let's just enjoy life."
Eugenia Zaki, a current member of the board, was the only holdout in its otherwise unanimous decision to impose the fine, which president John Bennett characterizes as necessary to put a stop to Zaki's "troublemaking" and maintain the integrity of what he called "our covenants."
By these, Bennett means the basic rules of order that serve as a kind of constitution for The Hamptons homeowners association, including a ban on any commercial use of the property name.
Zaki's Web site violates this covenant by "trying to sell an idea," says Bennett -- the idea being that association management is performing inadequately and behaving badly.
In particular, the Web site expresses unhappiness with the board's position on the matter of the gaslights installed as a special amenity outside each of the community's 254 homes.
After nearly three years as a resident of The Hamptons, Zaki has had enough of the gaslights, which burn night and day, and which, he says, are inefficient, dangerous, environmentally indefensible and maybe a bit vulgar.
"Burning something you don't need -- it must mean you're rich."
He wants to convert the lamppost on his property to solar power, or at least electric, anything that will not personally cost him $30 a month, according to his estimates, since homeowners are responsible for all lamplight-related costs.
In the end, though, it is not the money that motivates Zaki, nor his concern for public safety. A fire at the base of one of the lampposts burned for 13 hours last February -- "an outrage."
What's really bothering him, he says, is "I don't like being dictated to."
And that is a problem, says board president Bennett, because being dictated to is a given in any deed-restricted community.
"It's not the gas, really, it's about power," says Bennett. "Whatever it is, Zaki is against it. That's the way he operates, always stirring the pot.
"Frankly, I couldn't care less what he has to say on his Web site. Just don't use the name Hamptons in it, because you signed a document saying you wouldn't do that."
On both sides there is a rigid insistence on the principle of the thing and, principles being inherently personal, the conflict is taking on a distinctly mano a mano edge.
Bennett, Zaki points out, was flushed out of association office once already during a homeowners revolt a few years back.
Zaki, Bennett points out, has been nothing but trouble since he moved here, which was several years after Bennett's own arrival.
"I'm one of the original property owners," says Bennett, who came to The Hamptons in 2001 from Chicago, where he had been a special-ed teacher and administrator. "Zaki was a resale."
However much The Hamptons affair may seem a diverting way to pass the last days of a long summer, another association official, board treasurer Jay Merrick, insists that there are serious matters involved.
Zaki, he says, "is the sort of guy that every homeowners association dreads getting. He just won't quit."
"You have to understand that you buy property in a deed-restricted community because you want those restrictions," says Merrick, who describes himself as "more comfortable in a community where I do not have to worry that my neighbor is going to decide to paint his house purple."
Allowing Zaki to continue to break even a minor covenant would constitute selective enforcement, he points out. "The guy who does want to paint his house purple, he can say, 'Well, you let him get away with it ...'"
Bennett, who says he "only followed the will of the board" in contacting the association's attorney about Zaki's Web site, is not sure which board member originally proposed the idea: "I just don't recall."
Whoever suggested it, Bennett supports the move, but admits to growing concern that "this whole thing is getting out of hand.
"Zaki knows he wouldn't be able to win his case in court, so now he is going to appeal to the court of public opinion, with all this First Amendment stuff, making a mountain out of a molehill."
"People are going to think we're a bunch of lunatics," said the association president. "And maybe we are."
In the gaslit streets of The Hamptons, meanwhile, high noon is now just one week away.
"No regrets," says John Bennett.
"Believe me," says Kamel Zaki, "I have faced much worse than this."
Thought this might make for some good discussion.
