OVA Governing Documents Revision Status – Oct 22, 2025

This will be a summary of recent activities of the Governing Documents Committee (GDC) and of what is likely to occur between now and the election in the spring. I will freely express my opinions, so you may consider this to be an editorial, though it is largely comprised of objective information.

The GDC is an advisory ad hoc committee whose purpose is to assist the OVA Board in revising our governing documents. There are three categories of changes that are needed:

• Making it reasonably feasible to update our governing documents: Our current Bylaws require a majority of all OVA voters to vote in favor of any Bylaws amendment, a very difficult hurdle to overcome. Our CC&Rs are even worse, requiring 75% of all OVA voters to approve any amendment. Without reducing these hurdles by amending our Bylaws and CC&Rs, any other amendments are unlikely to be approved.
• Compliance with state law: As new California laws have been passed since Oakmont was founded, a number of inconsistencies with the new laws have arisen. Because our governing documents are so difficult to change, our governing documents have not been amended to eliminate these inconsistencies. At best this causes confusion to OVA members (are our dues really limited to $10/month? [Bylaws paragraph 2.61]). At worst, OVA might be subject to some sort of lawsuit for non-compliance with state law.
• Substantive amendments, as advocated by OVA members, staff and the Board: This is a broad category, including anything from membership votes on important decisions, to 2 votes per 2-person household, to authorizing increased OVA initiation fees, to allowing reptilian pets (e.g. turtles).

The biggest challenge for the GDC is the first category above, because without lowering the thresholds for making amendments, any other changes will be very difficult to achieve. But that first amendment must be enacted under the current rules (i.e. majority of voting power, for Bylaws amendments). Simply put

Without lowering the threshold for amending the Bylaws, the GDC is unlikely to be able to achieve the rest of its mission.

GDC activities so far: Since the current members of the GDC started work in July, they have made serious progress toward achieving their mission, including planning a timeline that will lead to the first Bylaws amendment election in over 3 decades, to be held concurrently with the OVA directors election in early 2026. Working closely with the OVA Board and OVA staff, they have published articles in the Oakmont News and on the OVA website (most recently, Governing Documents: Get Involved, Be Heard), and they have held an OVA Townhall and several fireside chat events, in an attempt to educate OVA members and solicit their inputs.

Unfortunately, member attendance at these events has been sparse. It is difficult to get people interested in something so dry as changing the threshold for approving Bylaws amendments, especially when the election is months away. Hopefully more people will become interested when the election season begins in January!

NOTE: I have fair confidence that the timeline I discuss below will happen approximately as I am depicting it, but nothing is certain until it happens! However, if the Bylaws amendment election were to be delayed and not happen concurrently with the OVA directors election, it would make it even more challenging to get the voter turnout that is necessary in order to achieve the majority-of-voting-power requirement for amending the Bylaws. This should motivate everyone who believes that revising our Bylaws is important to try to keep to the timeline.

Process between now and the election: Because any amendment to our Bylaws requires a formal election, we must follow the rules and timeline that govern such an election. This means that the content of the ballot will have to be finalized by December in order to allow time enough for all of the election-related activities that must take place between then and when the votes are counted around April 1. So the GDC’s most pressing current task, to be completed within the next few weeks, is to generate a detailed proposal for the ballot, which will be presented to the OVA Board in November. (This proposal should be in the OVA Board meeting packet for all to inspect.) The Board will discuss the proposal, and may choose to modify it or to ask the GDC to modify it in some way, before voting on a final version in the December OVA Board meeting. Starting in January, if not before, the Board and the GDC should be going all out to get everyone to vote in favor of the proposed Bylaws amendments.

The election: Regardless of how many people turn in ballots, if fewer than a majority of OVA’s voting power (approximately 3,200) vote in favor of an amendment proposal, it will not be approved. So we need approximately 1,600 affirmative votes in order to enact an amendment. If we don’t get it, then the Bylaws will remain unchanged. Depending on the results, the Board might choose to try again, or it might extend the deadline for returning Bylaws amendment ballots to try to achieve the needed number of votes, or it might petition a court to get the amendment approved with less than the currently required number of votes.

Process to get your favorite amendment enacted: First, until the Bylaws amendment threshold is lowered, no substantive amendments can move forward, although the GDC may still discuss such amendment proposals in anticipation of a future lower threshold. Assuming that the threshold has been lowered, then the process for enacting an amendment will go something like this:

1. Determine as precisely as you can what amendment you would like to make. You should be familiar with the Bylaws and should specify what you want to replace or add.
2. Communicate your proposal to the GDC. An effective way to do this is to Email it to askGDC@oakmontvillage.com, or you could contact any of the GDC members listed here.
3. The GDC will consider your proposal, along with other proposals that they may receive, and will vet the proposal with an HOA lawyer. They may combine proposals to make a coherent proposal for presentation to the OVA Board. Or they might let you know that they did not approve your proposal, and their reasoning. As a general rule, they are committed to moving forward proposals that seem to have OVA membership support, and to being neutral on whether or not the proposals should be approved by the Board and the membership.
4. The GDC will present Bylaws amendment proposals to the OVA Board, which may modify them, and which may or may not decide to present them to the membership in a Bylaws amendment election. The election will follow OVA’s Election Rules and state law, and therefore will take at least 3 months from the time when the Board decides to hold it. The Board may decide to hold such proposals until the next directors election.
5. Finally, if the OVA membership votes in favor of the amendment and the required voting threshold is met, your amendment will become part of the OVA Bylaws and, thus, part of the “law of the land” within Oakmont!

Where do the CC&Rs fit in: The OVA Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&Rs) are, frankly, a nightmare. The OVA CC&Rs are embedded in the CC&Rs for each of the 70 or so subHOAs and subdivisions within Oakmont. In order to amend the CC&Rs, prior to 2006, the requirement was an affirmative vote of 75% of both (1) the total voting power of OVA and (2) of the voting power of each subHOA/subdivision. In 2006, an attempt was made to amend the CC&Rs to eliminate the second requirement, but not all subHOAs/subdivisions approved it (under the second rule). I don’t understand the implications of that, other than to know that it is a mess. The GDC may, in the next few weeks, decided to put a threshold-lowering amendment in the spring ballot, but the chances of getting a 75% of voting power approval are not good, much less the chances of getting 75% approval within each subHOA/subdivision that did not approve the 2006 proposal. [My apologies to those who understand this better, if I have gotten any of this wrong. What I described is my understanding, from having listened to it being discussed in GDC meetings.]

Opinion alert! Ideally, there should be a single set of OVA CC&Rs, and all of the subHOA/subdivision CC&Rs should be amended to refer to the single OVA CC&Rs document. The only way I see this happening is for the GDC and OVA attorney(s) to prepare a rather massive proposal to present to a court, and for the court to order it to be done. One virtue of putting a CC&R threshold proposal on the ballot next spring would be to provide evidence of Oakmont membership opinions to the court. Is this feasible? I have no idea — that is for the lawyers to try to figure out.

Conclusion: Amending the OVA Bylaws and CC&Rs for legal compliance is extremely desirable. It may not be absolutely essential, since state law will often simply override conflicting portions of our governing documents. But we also want to be able to amend our Bylaws to bring them up to date after decades of obsolescence and to implement reforms to make our governance more democratic. With good intentions, competence and perseverance, the process started by this year’s GDC will lead to amended governing documents that are more useful and that we can be proud of!

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The OVA GDC meets on the first Tuesday of each month at 10 am in Suite B of the OVA offices, and sometimes for additional meetings if needed. Minutes provide the official documentation of Committee activities and decisions and will be posted on the OVA website after they are approved at the succeeding GDC meeting. The Committee web page, with links to all posted agendas and meeting minutes, can be found at https://oakmontvillage.com/article/author/bylaw-revision-committee/. If you would like to see first-hand how the Committee operates and what progress they are making, or if you would like to express your opinion about their activities or goals, then you should consider attending.

FINALLY — If you have any opinions to express on this topic, feel free to express them in Oakmont Observer comments.

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