Country Living Association

For the most part, the boards of home owners association boards do a good job, and its fairly thankless too. Nobody bothers with them until they need something, and then if they dont get their way, they dont like the board.

Boards can have difficult members or can just be difficult. If a neighborhood is a particularly big one that tends to have problems or friction between people, then boards can start to do a lot of things that are rather surreptitious. According the the law, it takes a majority vote by homeowners to change anything in the bylaws. There are sneaky boards, however, that just change their house rules and dont even bother with a vote.
House rules can be just as binding as bylaws, and most rules say that they can be rewritten without asking. Boards tend to change their house rules all the time and too often it is just on a whim to appease a board member. That makes sorting anything out by homeowners somethings difficult because they arent always up to date on the house rules - if ever. Its a two edged sword of sorts. Boards have to have the authority to run the association in the way they think best. And that power is pretty autonomous. The smart home owner will try to keep up on all the bylaw changes, and if you dont like them, you must complain. It may be that you have to get squeaky about it but you know that old adage, and it works.

Dont give into boards if you think they are wrong. It is supposed to be more democratic than not, and you cant just roll over. The best thing to do is to make sure that the board members are wise and reasonable people to start with.