Safe Driving, Lawsuits, and Osuna Poll Results/Recommendation

Author: Phil Trubey

Date: October 28, 2025

Hello, Phil Trubey here, sending an occasional email about RSF.

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Stay Safe

A friend of mine was driving home last week when he made the fateful decision to reach for something on the floor.

BAM! He hit something. The airbags deployed. When the cobwebs cleared (airbags can give you a concussion), he saw his absolute worst nightmare: he had hit and killed someone.

I tell people that I don’t drive anymore, my Tesla does. Part of the reason is exactly this. The car is safer than I am. It doesn’t get distracted, it doesn’t glance at a phone when a text comes in, it sees better in the dark than I do, it reacts faster, and it performs evasive maneuvers more skillfully.

Sorry if this comes across as a Tesla ad, but it's heartfelt.

All my kids drive Teslas because I know the active safety systems in them are better than anyone else’s. See the video linked here: a five‑minute compilation I made showing Tesla’s automatic hazard avoidance in action. It’s truly impressive. 

And only Tesla has urban self-driving capabilities. We've all heard the stat of 41,000 annual US driving deaths, but if you look at serious injuries, it balloons to 2M in the US per year. And 80% of those serious injuries occur on urban, rural or other non-divided highway driving.

Next year, our Teslas will receive a free over the air software update enabling unsupervised self‑driving. Right now, even though my car drives me everywhere, it ensures I’m still paying attention to the road just in case (another reason why it’s so safe). But next year I won’t even need to do that.

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Lawsuits

The last otherwise uneventful Association Board meeting started off with a bang. Listen to the first Member comment here.

Some thoughts. First, the Association carries Directors and Officers (D&O) insurance, which covers all Board members’ expenses should they be sued for their official acts. But the Association goes even further—it indemnifies all Board members for those acts. This means that even if the D&O insurance runs out or falls short, the Association itself (funded by our assessments) would cover the Board members’ defense costs.

Given the Association’s taxing authority, this results is a very large war chest for defending against lawsuits.

Additionally, if you study HOA litigation, you’ll find that unless Board members commit actual malicious fraud, courts generally side with the HOA. Judges give Boards wide latitude to interpret their own bylaws and regulations, and corporate law grants Boards significant leeway under the business judgment rule when making decisions.

While recovery rules can be complex, the prevailing party in an HOA lawsuit can often recover legal fees, making it potentially very expensive to sue an HOA and lose.

Finally, when you sue an HOA, you are effectively suing your neighbors, since we all share in the cost of legal defense through our dues (at least until the Association prevails and recovers fees). Don’t expect to be celebrated by the community if you decide to sue your HOA.

By the way, the Art Jury is similarly indemnified.

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Osuna Poll Results

Well, that was an interesting social experiment. When I programmed my polling system, I implemented only very basic anti-cheating technology, with the expectation that not many people would find the workarounds and try to “ballot stuff”.

After a forensic review of my logs and other data, it’s clear a small number of people couldn’t resist and voted multiple times.

So, while the Osuna poll final results aren't accurate (though it was never going to be since my mailing list isn’t fully representative of all Members who vote), it did give us interesting information about the character of some of our Members.

Anyway, my take on the results, adjusted for what I suspect the true outcome would have been without cheating, is that Membership is roughly 50/50 split between a) doing nothing, or b) selling the unused 4+ lower Osuna acres. The other two options of spending $3M in assessments to upgrade Osuna, or selling the entire property don't have enough support.

So, my unsolicited advice to the Board is that they can choose between letting things lie the way they are or running an advisory vote with a single question: Should the Association do a lot split of Osuna to separate out the lower 4+ unused acres with the expectation of selling only that portion while retaining the rest, and using the proceeds to upgrade Osuna?

Needless to say my next poll on whatever will be considerably locked down to allow only one vote per email recipient.

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Previous emails, Rancho information, poll results, and the old RSF Post archives available at myrsf.net.

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