Call Kurtis

Call Kurtis: Weathering a Woodside Condo Storm

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ― Woodside condos had severe flooding 2 1/2 years ago. Dozens of homeowners were devastated and Lucy Whitson was one of them.

She bought her condo just three days before the flood and the recovery costs killed her financially. Years later, she still fighting her home owner's association and accuses them of illegally foreclosing on her home.

"This was all water, everywhere," Lucy Whitson says as she scans the grounds of her Woodside Condominium complex.

"I don't know if you know what black water looks like when it's been in a house but it's just really ugly," she recalls, but Lucy knows it all too well.

Flash back to New Year's Eve, 2005.

Water inundated her home, along with about 60-others at Woodside in Sacramento; nearby streams and sloughs just couldn't contain what storms dumped.

The stucco walls outside her condo and along the carport still have a definite ring, stains from the muddy water, about two feet up from the ground.

"This is flood here" she says.

Lucy closed escrow just three days before the flood. Suddenly, she forced to tear out floors and carpeting, and rent a storage unit. 14 hundred dollars in out-of-pocket emergency expenses made it impossible for her to pay the first six months of home owner's association dues.

So in April, 2006, four months after the flood, she wrote a letter to the H.O.A. board.

She said "literally, please help me. Here are my expenses. Don't turn me over to collections. I've got great credit."

She also asked for reimbursement of thousands in emergency response costs, costs she says should have been paid by the H.O.A. No one responded.

"I found that kind of shocking, kind of unconscionable."

Then in August of 2006, she wrote another letter to the board, and was making her payments; she was caught-up by September. Again, no one responded to her letter.

Then in February of 2007, Lucy learned that the H.O.A. had put a lien on her home and was foreclosing.

"To me it's outrageous to turn a flood victim over to collection. You know it's traumatic, financially, emotionally, and it's a real struggle to get over it."

Woodside H.O.A. then stopped depositing her payments and sent her to collections. Now after two and a half years of trying to resolve her dispute with the H.O.A., she called me.

We contacted Woodside H.O.A. president John Bird. He declined to comment on camera but told us by phone lawyers for the H.O.A. and Lucy are working on a settlement, that he "wants it to go away and be fair."

Lucy says the H.O.A. has been anything but fair.

"They're really being unlawful, because I think the code section (ccs 1366-1367.5) asks the home owners association to do whatever it can to deal with the owner first. That didn't happen with me."

We asked Bird if the H.O.A. followed the law when foreclosing on Lucy; he replied, "I'm not sure. I hope so, pray so."

Woodside is foreclosing on at least 25 other homeowners right now, however Bird can't say if any of those are related to the flooding of 2005.

Lucy hopes that telling her story will empower others.

"Perhaps other home owners will say wait a minute we don't want our board acting like that. You know, we're all humans and homeowners and they're not acting like that."

Lucy says Woodside has just accepted a settlement offer, and is waiting to seal the deal in writing. Lucy researched her rights as a condo owner, online. She took that info to the association, her lawyer, and to us, and that made for a stronger defense.

In 2003, Sacramento County twice urged Woodside to build a flood wall to protect itself. Bird says they should have built it, but the majority of homeowners voted against it.

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