Dear Board of Delegates:

Thank you. Always so considerate of us. Always so attentive to making our lives easier. One almost gets emotional. When it's not a stratospheric levy, it's a convoluted procedure. An admirable choreography, no doubt.

However, this time you have outdone yourselves.

It turns out that the truly delicate matters—those affecting the pockets of hundreds of families and the future of the urbanization—will not be debated at the Extraordinary General Meeting on February 1st. Why? Mystery. Miracles of creative administration.

But rest assured, your solution deserves a doctoral thesis:

"If you wish to debate these matters, each neighbor must send us a signed document requesting their inclusion in the agenda. We will subsequently assess, according to appropriate criteria, what to do with those requests."

Easy, peasy. A sort of bureaucratic obstacle course to see how many neighbors manage to print, fill out, sign, scan, or send the damn letter without making a mistake. After all, if someone gets lost along the way, it doesn't get debated, and everyone’s happy.

A perfect plan. For you, of course.

Thank goodness—and this truly is a biblical miracle—that there are volunteers from the neighborhood initiative, those "sick people" or "shit-stirrers," as you have come to call us, who in their spare time do the work that a Board claiming to represent everyone should be doing.

They have already prepared the points, sent them to you, published the signature document on the website at this link, and even offered their own home mailboxes to collect signatures from people who don't have a digital certificate.

Come on, if it were up to you, neighborhood participation would have died of starvation. But here we remain, determined to stay alive.

And meanwhile, the shadow of the dark points keeps growing. The same ones that many neighbors have reported with Franciscan patience and that anyone can read—if there is still any skeptic left—in: Reader's Letters.

Incomplete reports, dancing figures, lack of transparency, decisions made by few and paid for by many... but no, debating all this is "not appropriate".

One suspects—with the suspicion that experience brings—that the hope of some is that the majority won't even find out about the procedure and will attend the Meeting without knowing what they can ask for, what they can vote on, or what they can prevent.

And you know: silence implies consent; and whoever leaves the room before voting... also consents. You are very fond of such subtleties.

Luckily, you also know that for every obstacle you put up, a new neighbor appears ready to jump over it. And another, and another. And so on until, with a bit of collective dignity, we manage to debate the issues that affect everyone, and not just those who handle the minutes and the pen.

Let everyone follow their path. We already know yours: impossible procedures, uncomfortable silences, and decisions made in offices where only a few fit. Ours is diametrically different: neighbors helping neighbors, supporting those who cannot afford an abusive levy, and doing the work that should never have fallen on the citizens.

Meanwhile, the Board continues to look the other way, clinging to its old habit of representing plots instead of people. But we will remain here: remembering that a community is not governed from above, but sustained from below. And, when necessary, in spite of you.

José M
Santa Maria de l'Avall, December 2025