The managing agent

Philip Bower is recorded as present at every 2025 board meeting in the minutes we hold, and signs the association's Annual Budget Report on behalf of the Board. The post-nominal CCAM is the Certified Common Interest Development Manager credential.

This is the part that matters most, and it is the thing most often misunderstood in a frustrating phone call.

The managing agent is a vendor, engaged by the Board under Bylaws Art. IV § 5 . They execute decisions. They do not make them. Every policy choice an owner might object to — the dues increase, the fine policy, the reserve funding level, which vendor got the contract, whether an architectural application is approved — is a decision of the five directors, taken at a board meeting, recorded in minutes you are entitled to read.

Being angry at the management company for a board decision is both unfair to them and strategically useless. The people who can change it are the directors, and the way to change them is an election.

There is one place the distinction is written into the rules explicitly. Under our Election Rules § 4.1 , the association's management and attorneys are barred from serving as Inspector of Elections. The people who administer the association may not also be the people who count the votes.

It is easy to assume the company that runs your association runs everything around you. In San Diego County that is not the shape of the market, and we would rather publish the real figures than a satisfying one.

Pernicano's own website reports 58 communities. San Diego County has roughly 2,500 to 3,000 community associations. That is somewhere around one in forty-three — a well-established local firm, not a dominant one.

For scale, the largest firms in the county manage several hundred associations each. The genuine concentration story here is not any single local company: it is national roll-ups, and the fact that Associa appears twice in the county's top ten under two different brand names.

California does not license HOA management companies. Anyone may practice community management; the CACM and CAI credentials are voluntary, and Business and Professions Code § 11500 restricts only the use of the word "certified," not the work itself.

What the law does give you is disclosure. Under Civil Code § 5375 , before entering into a management agreement a prospective managing agent must disclose in writing — no more than 90 days beforehand — whether it or its officers hold relevant licences, and whether any professional certifications or designations are currently held, including what they are, the dates they are valid, and the name they appear under.

That disclosure, and the executed management agreement itself, are association records. You can ask for them in writing.

Worth asking alongside it: when was the management contract last put out to competitive bid, and what does it cost? A management agreement is one of the larger recurring line items in the budget, and it is a board decision.

Pernicano administers decisions; it does not make them. Under Bylaws Art. IV § 2 the Board holds the powers and duties of administration, and under Bylaws Art. IV § 5 it may employ a management agent to carry out the duties it authorizes.

So a question about how something was done goes to the manager, and a question about why the policy is what it is goes to the Board. The board sets policy, and the board is elected.