If hell has a homeowners association, it’s probably run something like this:
Board members, elected to a 12-month term, fail to hold an open membership meeting for 14 months and an election for 17 months.
Board members pay each other to do jobs around the property, pay the board president to keep the books (poorly), and give themselves a pass on paying their own HOA dues.
Board members take major actions, like hiring a property management company and a lawyer without holding an open meeting — potentially a violation of law.
Entrenched incumbents change election rules after the votes are counted and the results announced, to thwart a reformer’s effort to obtain a seat on the board.
A board member dies, and his widow is appointed to fill the vacant seat without others getting to apply.
A homeowner who suspects shenanigans gets a surprise bill for thousands of dollars for exercising her legal right to see the HOA’s spending records.
We have an HOA like that right here in Wichita, and it’s called the Fairmont Homeowners Association.
Some members are in open revolt against the board, with good reason. Through a petition, homeowners have forced a recall vote, scheduled for Wednesday evening.
Association bylaws specify that board terms are for one year and elections are to be held annually. The last election was on March 13, 2024.
The nonprofit organization Wichita Independent Neighborhoods has scheduled a board candidate forum for 6:30 p.m. Monday next to the HOA pool, despite receiving an email from board member Brian Hay saying “we do not require your assistance at this time,” copied to the other board members and their lawyer.
WIN president Trish Hileman wrote back that the forum will be held regardless.
“If current Board members are interested in running again, should the recall vote be successful, I would hope they would appreciate the opportunity to tell their neighbors about themselves and why they are running,” Hileman wrote. “WIN is attempting to provide a more neutral 3rd party platform for neighbors to get educated before your meeting on Aug. 20th.”
If anyone needs WIN’s assistance, it’s the members of the Fairmont HOA.
Getting this far has taken more than a year of research and neighborhood organization mostly done by homeowner Shala Perez, who has a background in law enforcement and government.
Perez has uncovered multiple instances where the board’s actions appear to be in violation of the Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill Of Rights Act and/or the association bylaws that are required under the act.
While Fairmont, with 214 homes, isn’t the biggest HOA in Wichita, it represents a cautionary tale for everybody who lives in one.
“Every new home being built is in an HOA community, and people really need to understand their responsibilities and their duties,” said Perez. “If they are choosing to move into an HOA, it’s not something they can just decide to opt out of. They can’t just ignore it or pretend to be too busy.”
Concerns raised at meeting
I may not be the best person to comment on HOAs. I’ve never lived in one, and I never plan to.
I really don’t need some nosy neighbor with a ruler measuring the depth of my grass or the size of the oil spot in my driveway. I bought my house and I’ll paint it whatever color I want.
But while homeowners associations pretty much exist to enforce conformity in neighborhoods, there comes a point where even the most conformist owners need to take a long, hard look and say “What is going on here?”
Fairmont has reached that point.
Board members declined comment for this report. But after 14 months without a general membership meeting, they took questions from some Fairmont neighbors who aired their concerns at a board meeting belatedly called in June.
When I arrived at that meeting, the board president, Justin Thelen, met me just inside the door and told me I’d have to leave, because I wasn’t a member of the association.
The state’s HOA bill of rights specifies that meetings must be open to the homeowners, but not to anybody else, so I left.
But other homeowners caught me in the parking lot, invited me back inside and made it clear they wanted me there, so the board reluctantly agreed I could stay.
Most of the residents who spoke at the meeting expressed suspicion and criticism of the board.
Two residents, Kari Oglesby and her husband, Nick, presented a detailed written request for financial records, governance documents and internal controls so that she, a bank auditor and he, a financial planner, can conduct an audit of the HOA books.
“Honestly, the reason that my wife and I are here is because over this past year, we’ve seen not one, not two, not three, but 10-plus red flags,” Nick Oglesby said. “And so I’ve actually drafted a letter to the board specifically, actually for our right to audit as association members.”
The meeting drew approximately 35 homeowners. That’s about how many votes the current board members got in their last election.
“I think this number of people in this turnout is directly related to, we’ve lost trust,” said resident Daniel Cahill. “We thought things were great for so many years — for me, almost 21 years — and we’ve lost trust. And I think it’s time to do something different.”
Pickup truck complaint leads to suspicion
It all started with a parked pickup truck.
The Fairmont HOA is situated in northeast Wichita, west of 127th Street just northeast of the junction of 21st Street and the K-96 freeway.
It’s just to the north of two major religious complexes, the Church of the Magdalen Catholic Church and School, and NewSpring, a nondenominational megachurch with a weekly attendance of about 6,500. One of NewSpring’s driveways connects through the Fairmont neighborhood.
Shortly after buying her home in Fairmont in July 2023, Perez noticed that there was a white pickup habitually parked along the curb on Boxthorn Street, which is where NewSpring traffic lets out. So she went to the HOA meeting to find out about the truck.
“I brought up the fact that that truck being parked on that bend could be kind of a problem and create a traffic hazard when you have that much (church traffic) right there, and I had almost been hit head-on twice,” she said.
It turned out the truck belonged to Bob Kisner, the husband of board member Diane Greenleaf-Kisner. The board didn’t do anything about it, claiming they lacked jurisdiction, according to the meeting minutes.
But during the meeting, Perez discovered that the board had been paying some of its members to do work around the property, and that they had waived their own HOA dues.
Perez knew that was prohibited by the HOA bylaws, which she had read in detail before signing papers to buy her home.
Questioned about that in the June meeting this year, Thelen blamed it on bad advice from a previous management company.
“We sought legal counsel last year, and our attorney advised us that . . . we were given wrong information of self dealing, that we were not to be paid,” Thelen said. “We could not waive our dues, even though it had been going on for many years prior.”
Board members have indicated that they are now paying their dues and say they plan to make some kind of restitution on previous payments, but details have not been provided to the HOA members.
Election results overturned
Perez has a masters degree in criminal justice and teaches criminal investigation and law at Butler Community College. She’s worked as a Wichita State University police officer, a state corrections official and project director of the Governor’s Task Force on Racial Profiling.
When her suspicions were aroused by what she saw at her first HOA board meeting, she decided to run for a seat on the board.
In the March 2024 board election, Thelen announced that seven seats would be up for grabs, although only five were filled at the time.
Each of the sitting board members — whose names were listed on preprinted ballots — nominated themself for reelection and received 36 votes (each household gets two votes, regardless of how many people live there).
Perez nominated herself from the floor, seeking one of the two open seats.
Because her name wasn’t on the preprinted ballot, she could only receive votes by write-in from the people who actually came to the meeting. She got 10 and there were no other candidates.
A motion was made and approved to accept the election results, after which Thelen announced: “Okay, there we go. That’s six board members. Yeah, all right, cool. Ms. Perez, you’re now an active board member on the board.”
But she never got to sit on the board.
The ink was barely dry on the ballots before the incumbents decided among themselves to nullify Perez’s election by reducing the number of board seats to five — meaning Perez was kicked off because she had gotten the sixth-most votes.
The bylaws give the board authority to set the number of board members between a minimum of three and a maximum of seven — although it’s questionable whether they can legally do that outside of an official meeting, and state law explicitly says “the bylaws of the association must provide the number of members of the board of directors.”
Perez said she found out she’d been booted a few weeks later when she contacted the board to find out why she wasn’t receiving any communications about her new responsibilities, and why she hadn’t gotten notice of a meeting to select officers, which the bylaws specify must take place within 30 days of the election.
Perez had to wait more than a year for a full explanation.
In a letter dated May 22, 2025, the association’s lawyer, Steven Stark, informed Perez that his legal conclusion was that “President Thelen’s verbal announcement at the 3-13-24 Members Meeting that you were elected was in error.”
The letter continued: “Your interpretation of President Thelen’s comments before voting was conducted, where you allege ‘instructing the membership to vote for seven,’ is not shared by the Board, nor it appears by the Members who actually cast a vote in person or by proxy. Most of the written ballots voted for five positions; only one voted for six and none voted for seven.”
Let’s check the audio recording of the election meeting. What Thelen actually said was “For anybody who wants to be on the board, there’s seven spots on the board to be open every year. There’s five of us who want to continue to serve on the board, and anybody else who wants to can have a vote for that.”
It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of room for “interpretation” there. I guess that’s why I’m not a lawyer.
Management company, lawyer mysteriously hired
HOA boards are regulated by a state law called the Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill of Rights Act.
Its open meeting requirements are similar to the laws regulating local governments, designed to guarantee the rights of HOA members to observe and participate in decision-making that affects their lives and property.
“Meetings of the board of directors and committees of the association authorized to act for the association must be open to the unit owners except during executive sessions,” the law states. “No final vote or action may be taken during an executive session.”
An executive session, also known as a closed session, may be held only to: meet with an attorney and/or discuss legal matters, to discuss personnel issues, to consider contract negotiations and review bids if disclosure would harm the association, or to protect the personal privacy of an individual.
The law also requires that the homeowners be given notice of upcoming meetings, and at each meeting, “the board shall provide a reasonable opportunity for unit owners to comment regarding any matter affecting the common interest community and the association.”
Further, it requires that associations adopt bylaws and follow them, and hold at least one official meeting a year.
The Fairmont Board took significant actions for more than a year without any open meetings and without the opportunity for HOA members to weigh in.
For example, the board hired a management company earlier this year to collect dues and enforce HOA rules.
Members only discovered they were under new management when they started getting letters and notices of rules violations from a company called Real Property Management First Choice.
When Perez contacted the management firm and told them they may not have been validly hired, she got a stern and threatening letter from the association’s lawyer.
“You have no legal right to falsely state to RPM that its duly executed contract with the Association is invalid or to demand that RPM cease to perform its duties under the contract,” said the letter, signed by Stark. “Please consider this letter our notice to you to cease and desist your tortious interference communications to RPM with the intention to cause the cancellation of the duly executed contract with the Association. If you fail to comply with this demand, the Association will be forced to consider taking legal action against you.”
Perez fired back, and is considering filing her own legal action against the board.
“I have repeatedly asked you and RPM to provide me a copy of the signed contract and information about when and how this contract came into existence,” she wrote in response to Stark. “You are fully aware that without a public meeting being held, a budget being adopted, or an opportunity for comment from Members, there is absolutely NO possible way that ‘contract’ could have been legally adopted in compliance with the governing documents of the Fairmont HOA or Kansas law.”
RPM did back out of the deal, at least for now, and the HOA has yet to sue Perez.
In her response, Perez raised the same complaint about the board hiring Stark without a vote in an open meeting.
“Your own contract for representation with the Fairmont HOA board has also been adopted without compliance with Kansas law or the policies of its governing documents and is being kept secret from the Members of the Fairmont HOA,” she wrote.
A spreadsheet of HOA expenditures, distributed at the June meeting, showed a dramatic rise in the HOA’s legal bills.
In 2023, the association paid $75 in attorney fees. In 2024, it was $4,675.
A $2,827 bill for requesting HOA records
A lot of the difference in legal bills is related to a request Perez made to examine the HOA’s spending records, a right guaranteed by state law.
After she was provided the records, she was hit with a surprise bill for $2,827.
The invoice said it was for 25.7 hours of “professional services” at $110 an hour.
Perez refused to pay that (state law requires record charges must be reasonable). So the board tacked on a $25 late fee and turned it over to a collection agency, which added $713 of its own fees, bringing the total to $3,565.
Perez called the collection agency and it dropped its attempt to collect the bill. She took Thelen to small-claims court to try to get the bill invalidated, but the judge dismissed the case because she hadn’t paid the bill, so there was nothing to recover.
Stark, the association lawyer, said at the June meeting that the bill was high because the association’s spending records were in a state of disarray when Perez requested them.
“My understanding of visiting with the prior attorney that handled that open records request is that the records that were produced . . . were not organized in any kind of fashion, and so that lawyer and his staff spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out in what box, so to speak, the records relate to, put it in some kind of a sequence, etc., and then had to go through and redact information that was confidential or private,” Stark said.
Stark said the board has now decided to “eat that fee” they tried to charge Perez, and said the request should have been handled differently from the start.
“The homeowner that made that request should have been given an option . . . to come and view the records in whatever disorganized fashion they were . . . instead of just reproducing these, spending all that time and then saying here they are, here’s the printout,” he said.
While Perez now doesn’t have to pay the ridiculous records bill, her refusal to do so led to the board blocking her access to the community swimming pool and kicking her off of the HOA’s private online portal, where homeowners can communicate with each other and pay their HOA dues electronically.
Board engages in self-dealing
In the records, Perez discovered contracts paying Thelen $250 a month for bookkeeping services in 2022 and 2023.
Obviously, he did a lousy job, given that it took $2,827 of law-firm time to get the books in order.
The bookkeeping payments appear to directly conflict with an HOA bylaw stating “No director shall receive compensation for any service he may render to the Association.”
The records show that Thelen and other board members were paid out of HOA funds on other occasions.
For example, one entry shows that over two months in 2021, Thelen received $1,800 for “pool/weekly maintenance” — at the same time the association was paying an outside contractor $2,706 to maintain the pool.
Thelen said at the June meeting that the HOA paid another board member, Steve Atkinson, to spread mulch at the association’s playground.
“John (board member John Tarrance) was nice enough to actually source (the mulch) with his contact for Home Depot, and Steve and his buddy, I think we paid them $500 or something along the lines of that, to spread,” he said at the meeting.
After Atkinson died in a scuba diving accident in February, board members quietly appointed his widow, Bonnie, to his seat on the board through a closed selection process.
It’s unclear how they could legally do that without having a meeting open to the membership, but they did.
The homeowners found out about it when it was announced as a done deal during the June meeting.
Thelen has a debit card for HOA expenses. Many receipts are missing from the records, but one from July of 2021 showed a charge from Amazon for $15.99 for replacement lenses for Oakley sunglasses.
At that time, expenses were checked by HOA Management Services, which then had a contract to manage the association.
A hand-written note on the receipt says “Fairmont personal purchase on HOA debit card — Justin to reimburse transfers $16.16.”
When Perez asked about that at the June meeting, Thelen said he didn’t know anything about it.
“I don’t think that there was any Oakley glasses, or even lenses,” he said. “There was a time when there was a shortage during COVID, that there was a shortage of chlorine, and we bought chlorine through Amazon, yes.”
Perez: “So you deny buying that and having to reimburse the HOA?”
Thelen: “Yeah, I don’t recall that.”
At the June meeting, questions were raised whether Thelen was even eligible to be board president and making spending decisions for the association, because his parents own the house he lives in.
During that discussion, a resident asked from the audience “Do you have a criminal record, I’m just curious?” Thelen replied, “Yes I do,” but did not elaborate.
Not Shala Perez’s first rodeo
I first met Perez in 2010 when I covered state government. She was fired from the governor’s office after reporting to the FBI that members of the Racial Profiling Task Force and two associated state commissions had squandered more than $80,000 on highly suspect expenditures.
They included paying contractors more than $35,000 for a website that was never finished, $13,000 in speaker fees to a handful of politicians and state contractors, $10,000 for a lavish “town hall meeting” featuring KC strip steak dinners and a four-piece band, and $7,000 for three people to attend a political conference in Washington, including tickets to a gala dinner with President Barack Obama and VIP passes to a rap concert.
Then-Gov. Mark Parkinson denied Perez’s forced resignation was because she raised a stink over the spending, but offered no alternative explanation.
Perez knows when something doesn’t smell right, and isn’t afraid to challenge it, even if it costs her consequences.
Some Fairmont members have accused her of upsetting the placid nature of their neighborhood, and she got some nasty comments recently as she sat at a card table on the lawn by the pool, collecting signatures for the petition that forced Wednesday’s recall election.
No doubt she’s caused some stress.
But there’s also no doubt she’s uncovered substantial evidence of backroom deals, self dealing, inadequate financial controls and post-election manipulation of association leadership that justifies the upset she’s caused.
And that’s just through 2023. Little is known about what happened in 2024 and 2025, because requests for those detailed spending records by Perez and by the Oglesbys have gone unfulfilled.
It’s time for members of the Fairmount HOA to pay attention.
They need to attend the WIN forum on Monday, whether the current board members decide to show up or not, and to vote on Wednesday.
Because the record shows this is no way to run a homeowners’ association.
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