Important Facts about this Lawsuit:

Join the app. 80 KNC homeowners who have already donated to support our formal legal challenge in Summit County District Court to how the Keystone Neighbourhood Company allocates votes. If you are a KNC homeowner, are you upset that you have no say in the amount of your annual property assessments and how they are used? Are you upset that KNC's Board of Directors, of whom six out of nine are Vail Resorts employees or appointees, have decided to underwrite, using our funds, a four-million-dollar snow melt system on Kindred's private property and there is simply nothing you can do about it? Are you upset that when you sell your property, that you will have to pay 2% of your equity to an organization that loses a 1/2 million dollars of your money, year after year, that compensates the KNC staff at a level of about 1.7 million dollars per year, without any ability on your part to have a say in how your dollars are spent?

Well then, join our fight to challenge how KNC works. Join our fight to reform the voting system, so that homeoners who provide the funds can vote to decide how the funds are used. Join the fight to change how the votes work now, wherein KNC allocates 1,000 votes to Vail Resorts for its ownership of a non-revenue-generating, non-buildable parcel that has no connection, physical or otherwise, to the Keystone Ski Resort. This allocation ensures that the original Declarant (Vail Resorts) never has to actually relinquish control of the HOA, which we believe to be illegal by Colorado HOA law. Check out our attorney, Alex Dorotik of Ingenuity Law in Denver, explain our complaint in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL7-64sEpFU.

The non-revenue generating, non-dues-paying parcel (i.e., the Beaver Pond) reduces homeowners 46% to only 46% of the total available votes. Yet homeowners pay over 90% of the revenues and own about 76% of all dues-paying properties! Yet we can never change this setup, because Vail Resorts' allocation of an extra 1,000 votes to itself, as the Declarant, excludes homeowners' chances to change the bylaws, requiring 67% to change.

Given that there are about 1,165 homeowners currently in the KNC, this means KNC has granted to Vail Resorts almost as many votes to itself for this unusable, non-revenue-generating parcel, as there are votes for all KNC homeowners combined. The result? Vail Resorts owns less about 24% of dues-paying units in the KNC, pays less about 10% of all revenues, holdssix seats on the nine member Board, but gets to decide how to spend 100% of the funds.

This is horribly unfair, and it turns out, may in fact violate Colorodo HOA law. Our legal challenge asks one very important question? Is this 1,000 vote allocation that Vail Resorts gave to itself when it formed the KNC legal? We believe, our attorney believes, that the 1,000 vote allocation does not comply with Colorado HOA law, that the 1,000 vote allocation violates Colorado law that prohibits a Declarant from discriminating in favor of itself when allocating votes.

Where are we now in our lawsuit? When you donate, please also use our Google Sign Up form at www.Dissolve-KNC.org and you will learn where we are in our challenge to the legality (or not) of the 1,000 vote allocation to the non-dues-paying, non-revenue-generating, non-buildable parcel called the Resort Parcel, and what steps are next.

Help win this fight! We need yourfunding in order to continue this fight, in order to win.

Important Points to Consider:

1. If our lawsuit ultimately prevails, your donation will be refunded (minus minor fees that GoFund.me requires, on the order of 3%, minus the initial cost of the postcard mailings through first-class mail). This is true because if we win, the judge(s) will compel KNC to underwrite our attorney's fees.

2. Our attorney, Alex Dorotik of Ingenuity Law in Denver, believes that our legal challenge has a least an 8 out of 10 chance of prevailing.

3. Our lawsuit asks a very simple question of Summit County District Court - is KNC's allocation of 1,000 votes to the Declarant, i.e., to Vail Resorts, compliant with Colorado law? A basic reading of HOA law certainly suggests that such a 1,000 vote allocation on the basis of an un-buildable lot with no commercial connection to the resort, nor with any revenues generated from it, is not legal.

4. Our lawsuit asks the judge to rule on the legality of the 1,000 vote allocation.

5. Will there be another chance for KNC homeowners in the future to set things straight, for those that would rather wait this one out? Well, it only took 30 years for this one to come along, but who knows.

Please help fund this effort now, to make an HOA that is fair for all of us. Thank you!

Background

I am one of many Keystone Neighbourhood Company homeowners that was shocked to learn that the KNC HOA operates like no other HOA. The KNC HOA, established 30 years ago, grants complete veto power to the original Declarant, i.e., to Vail Resorts, on the basis of a parcel of land that can never be developed or contribute to the KNC. This 1,000 votes is above and beyond Vail Resorts' votes allocated on the basis of actual property ownership.

This is akin to granting about 37% of an entire HOA community's votes to the original Declarant of that HOA, simply because that Declarant, for example, maintains a mailbox on the HOA's property. Such an unfair allocation of votes, discriminating in favor of itself at the time of the HOA's creation, ensures that the Declarant maintains full control of the HOA in perpetuity, even when its owns only about 1 out of 4 dues-paying properties.

This feels very wrong and we believe it is illegal according to state law, and we are asking the court, in an ongoing proceeding, to rule on the legality of this allocation.

Now, even with a full town in place to provide what KNC is tasked with providing, KNC's unfair allocation of HOA votes continues to force KNC homeowners to:

a) pay annual assessments without any input to how much those assessments are, and for what those assessments are used;

b) suffer year over year losses of reserve funds due to poorly enacted and outdated marketing and economic promotion schemes;

c) fund privately owned properties, i.e., the Kindred, using our funds.

d) allocate over 15 million dollars of our funds for a Warren Station rebuild without any input on how those funds are used.

Please help fund this effort.

If you want the KNC to be a fair HOA, where your vote matters, then please support our legal challenge. All funds donated through this GoFund.Me account will be used exclusively for funding our attorney's work on our behalf and for outreach efforts to reach more of the 1,165 KNC homeowners.

Thank you!

Maureen Barrett, founder, Dissolve-KNC.org