Q. I am a condo unit owner with HOA property near my unit that was overlooked for many years with no landscaping.  I have in the past six years slowly landscaped the area.  No one from the board has said anything to me, and it is landscaped in accordance with the landscaping of the complex. 

The board president has a personal vendetta against me, and now after it is completed, has informed me the landscapers have been instructed to remove ALL my plantings and replace them with two holly bushes.  The plantings I put there are beautiful, and the area is 100 percent improved.  Putting the holly bushes there will decrease the beauty of the area I landscaped and waste HOA funding for landscaping that many other areas need. Can the board president force this? 

                                —What Can I Do?

A. “Associations have an affirmative obligation to maintain their general common areas pursuant to NRS 116.3017,” says attorney Adam Clarkson of The Clarkson Law Group, P.C., which has offices in Las Vegas, Reno, and San Francisco. “Unit owners do not have the right to cause improvement to the general common areas of their associations—even if they believe the areas are not being kept up to standards—because the property does not exclusively belong to the unit owner. If you wish to have input on the maintenance of common areas within an association you may speak to the board at a regularly scheduled board meeting, become a member of the board, or join an association’s landscaping committee.”