developer-controlled board extortion

Hey all, We bought a new condo in a building in which the developer chose to exercise their right to (fully) control the board for five years (I know, it sounds crazy that offering plans with this option exist, even when as in our building all units were sold very quickly, but apparently this is not that uncommon during and since the bubble years, our lawyer told us... the developer seems to... [more]

Hey all, We bought a new condo in a building in which the developer chose to exercise their right to (fully) control the board for five years (I know, it sounds crazy that offering plans with this option exist, even when as in our building all units were sold very quickly, but apparently this is not that uncommon during and since the bubble years, our lawyer told us... the developer seems to exercise this option to make it harder for unit owner to discover all the things that they screwed up...). We now want to do some renovations, and approached the board to provide us with an alteration agreement form, the charge to review the DOB drawings etc. The architect the board chose wants to charge us a minimum of 30 hours at $160/hour -- you do the math. This is on the order of what our architect charges us for the actual design work in the first place! This seems insane. Our architect, who has gone through this many times, thinks it should take them about 2-3 hours to review the DOB drawings. We pointed out to the dev/board that their (architect's) charge seems unreasonable and they have ignored us since then. Any suggestions as to what we can do would be greatly appreciated! -JK [less]