Amendments of Owner initiated Petition articles.

[John Cummings]

Owners are allowed to place petition articles on our annual voting agenda as long as the article meets all the requirements, one of these requirements is gathering the signature of 25 owners in our hoa.

The 25 owners signed the petition based on specific wording on the petition article.  When this article comes up for discussion, can it be amended or would an amendment invalidate the 25 signatures and thus the petition?   For example,  I signed a petition containing  "X".  I didn't not sign a petition containing "X+Y" and probably wouldn't have.

This topic has been discussed and nobody really knows the answer.

Thanks
John Cummings

[Atul Kapur]

Well, the rule is only going to be found in your rules and decided by your membership. RONR has no rule requiring a petition to place an item on the agenda.

However, if your rules are silent, then RONR says that once the motion as been moved, seconded, and stated by the chair, it belongs to the meeting and not to the mover or seconder (or, presumably, to those 25 who signed the petition to put it on the agenda). The meeting has the freedom to amend the motion before voting on it (within the bounds that the amendments must be germane to the original motion).

[Joshua Katz]

I don't have a citation for it, but my gut reaction is that amendments here, absent something in the bylaws, should only be permitted within the scope of notice. But I don't have a good reason for it, it just seems right to me.