Do some timeshares have members on the Board of Directors!

[rwcmath]

We noticed all Board Members were employed by Disney.

 

[disneynutz]

DVC board members are Disney employees, The people who live in the city of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista are Disney employees, the people on the board at RCID, (it's like a county government) are Disney executives, see a pattern here?

 

[rcchello]

You gave DVD the right to vote for your unit when you bought in. Who do you expect to populate the board? If you wanted your unit to vote against a Disney proposal/board member you would have to convince 60% of the ownership of your unit ( whatever a unit of your timeshare consists of) to vote against Disney. So to get a change in board representation you would need to get approximately 60% of the membership to vote against Disney in writing.

Without Disney doing something really terrible, it would take a miracle to get a vote against Disney. It would be easier to take them to court if the did something that affected the majority of the members negatively.

 

[JimMIA]

I don't know about ALL timeshares, but developer control of resort boards is most certainly NOT an original idea of Disney's!

 

[Dean]

We noticed all Board Members were employed by Disney.

All of the others I know of have members not only on the board but controlling the board in most cases.

 

[drusba]

Your inquiry raises an interesting question. Why don't the members get to elect the association board members. The answer is that it is the result of one of the cleverest legal manuevers created by Disney. The DVC timeshares in Florida are subject to the Florida timeshare act and also to many provisions of the condominium act including section 718.30, under which the "unit owners other than the developer" have the right to elect the majority of the board of directors of the association beginning the earlier of when 90% of the units have been sold or three years after 50% of the units have been sold, a condition that has been met for all DVC resorts other than Poly and possibly Aulani.

A "unit" in the DVC resorts is usually some combination of rooms, e.g., at OKW it is each building, while at AKV it is a combination of rooms such as two 2BRs. When you purchase, you get some small percentage of ownership in a unit. The Bylaws of each DVC resort association actually set out the requirements of 718.30 as ones to be followed by the association. To accomplish that "unit owner" vote of the association, the declarations relating to the association state that each unit shall have one vote on any matters which can be subject to vote, and any such vote shall be made only through a "voting representative" designated by the unit owners in a "voting certificate" agreed to by the members. Nothing really clever about that and nothing wrong either as you can have it set so that the owners need to first designate a voting representative of the unit owners when there are large numbers of such owners.

Where it starts to get clever is in the Master Cotenancy Agreement that every member is bound to follow. Under it, each member agrees to a voting certificate under which the developer, Disney Vacation Development Co., is the permanent voting representative, effectively giving all power to DVD to appoint the board and control the association.

However, that is just the first part of the clever maneuver. What Disney set up circumvents the requirements of 718.30 which point to member control of the association and, though it has yet to be challenged or ruled upon, what Disney has done could be subject to a legal challenge as a violation of 718.30, and it is not certain Disney would win.

The master stroke of cleverness is the lease agreement, under which a Disney entity, which owns the property on which each DVC resort sits, leased the property to DVD. Each lease has a termination date, 2042 currently being the earliest. If and when the lease terminates, all of the members' rights to use the property terminate, and thus effectively you lose everything when the lease teminates. Each lease is also subject to a possible earlier termination if certain provisions of the lease are violated. One of those provisions states that the Disney entity which owns the property has the right to terminate the lease if ever DVD no longer has the power to elect a majority of the board of directors of the association of each resort. That lease provision cannot be challenged under 718.30. In other words, the master stroke of cleverness: members could possibly mount a legal challenge to Disney's circumvention of the requirements of 718.30, but the draftsmen of all the DVC documents, likely forseeing that possibility, set it up so that everything could terminate if any members ever succeeded in doing so.