Homeowner resource
The governing documents
Every one of these documents is one you are entitled to as an owner. They are normally handed over as scanned PDFs — unsearchable, unreadable on a phone, and impossible to link to. These are the same documents in plain text, so you can search them, quote them, and send someone a link to the exact provision.
Which document controls 🔗
When two documents disagree, they do not carry equal weight. Civil Code § 4205 sets a strict order of authority — anything lower is unenforceable to the extent it conflicts with something higher.
- 1
California law
The Davis-Stirling Act and the Corporations Code. Overrides everything below.
- 2
The Declaration (CC&Rs)
Recorded against the property. Runs with the land and binds every owner.
- 3
The Bylaws
How the association governs itself — the board, meetings, voting, quorum.
- 4
Operating rules
Rules and Regulations, Election Rules, fine policy. The board adopts these on its own under Civil Code § 4360 — and can change them the same way.
This matters here more than in most communities. Our Bylaws were adopted in 1971 and the Rules and Regulations were last revised in January 2011. Substantial parts of California HOA law have been rewritten since — organizing rights, fines, elections, rentals, virtual meetings. Where an old provision conflicts with current statute, the statute wins.
The documents 🔗
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CC&Rs (Declaration)
Verified transcriptionThe recorded declaration. It defines what you own, what the association owns, who maintains what, and the use restrictions that run with the land. Binds every owner automatically on purchase.
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Bylaws
Verified transcriptionHow the association governs itself: the five-member board, terms and vacancies, member meetings, quorum, proxies, cumulative voting, and the 75% threshold to amend.
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Rules and Regulations
Verified transcriptionDay-to-day conduct rules: parking, pets, pool, common areas, architectural requests, noise. The lowest tier of authority, and the easiest for a board to change.
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Election Rules
Digital textHow directors are nominated and elected: who may run, who may be disqualified, secret ballots, the independent inspector of elections, cumulative voting, and the eleven-month limit on proxies. Adopted to comply with SB 323.
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Articles of Incorporation
Verified transcriptionThe association's corporate charter as a California nonprofit. Establishes its legal existence and purposes. Rarely consulted, but it is what makes the Corporations Code apply.
How these were made, and what that means 🔗
The Election Rules are a modern document and carry a real digital text layer, so that transcription is exact. The others survive only as scans — the Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation as 1971 typewriting, and the Declaration as a 1972 instrument recorded and then microfilmed. Those had to be re-read by optical character recognition.
OCR on a fifty-year-old microfilmed legal document is not perfect. Rather than publish a clean-looking transcription that quietly contains errors, we kept the character-recognition confidence score for every word and marked the uncertain ones like this. Where you see a mark, check it against the original before relying on it.
Being straight about the limits: the marks catch most errors, not all of them. A word the scanner read confidently but wrongly will not be marked. These transcriptions are a reading aid. The recorded original controls.
Pages not reproduced 🔗
Some pages of each original are not part of the instrument at all: dividers added by the document vendor, recorder's cover sheets, notary acknowledgments, blank leaves, site maps, and signature pages listing individual owners at their unit addresses. Each one is marked where it falls, saying what it was, so the page numbering stays honest and nothing looks as though it went missing by accident.
Four of them are the notice Government Code § 12956.1 requires on a recorded document — the warning that a restriction based on race, religion, sex, national origin, disability or familial status is void and may be struck. The Declaration carries three copies of it and the Rules one. No restriction of that kind appears in the documents transcribed here.
If you find one we missed, the remedy is in Government Code § 12956.2 : a Restrictive Covenant Modification form, obtained from and filed with the County Recorder, who strikes the language from the recorded document. It does not require the Association's agreement.
Getting the originals yourself 🔗
We deliberately do not host the PDFs. The copies in circulation carry a document vendor's order stamp identifying the unit that requested them, and republishing that would expose an individual owner. You do not need our copy in any case — you have your own right to these documents:
- From the association. Civil Code § 5200 makes the governing documents association records. Request them in writing; § 5210 sets the response deadlines. We have a ready-to-send letter for it, and Getting Association Records explains the process.
- The Declaration, from the County. It is a recorded instrument. The San Diego County Recorder holds it, filed against Jamacha Greens, Map No. 7121 (recorded November 19, 1971).
- At resale. Civil Code § 4525 requires an owner selling a unit to provide this whole package to the buyer.