By the day of the vote earlier this month, shareholders at the Fordham Hill Owner’s Cooperative were tired, but ready for change.

Having endured an exhaustively bitter board election campaign compounded by a management exodus, voters turned out to oust an unpopular board of directors that was, residents said, running the high-end University Heights housing cooperative into the ground.

In the six months leading up to the May 14 election, shareholders were bombarded by information, misinformation, superfluous audits, an emergency referendum, anonymous mailings, political attacks, flying accusations and several resignations.

In the end, local activist Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter and her slate of "New Vision" candidates, which includes former Bronx politician Israel Ruiz and Community Board 7 member Betty Errico, emerged victorious. Now, Pilgrim-Hunter says, the hard work of rectifying the problems at Fordham Hill begins.

"This is a new day at Fordham Hill," said Pilgrim-Hunter, playing the part of newly elected official for the first time and going through her to-do list. "We need to determine what our financial status is. Our management office is in shambles and our maintenance is a mess."

Pilgrim-Hunter’s first order of business will be to find a new property manager, or at least try to retain the old one.

The current manager, Everton Moore, recently announced that he would be leaving in June. Two other assistant managers have resigned this year. Moore said staff cuts as well as accusations and pressure from the old board had made the work environment toxic for him and his employees. Now, with a new board in place, Moore is considering staying at Fordham Hill.

"The new board has been much more communicative," Moore said.

The new board is also awaiting the results of a second financial audit. A first audit last fall didn’t uncover any inaccuracies or irregularities, but the old board initiated another "forensic" audit earlier this year. In calling for the audit, and through not-so-subtle inferences, the old board accused previous boards and current property management, including Moore, of mishandling millions of dollars over the past several years.

Moore laughed off the suggestion that he ever stole money from Fordham Hill and maintains that his management team has never acted improperly. Pilgrim-Hunter agrees with Moore and doesn’t understand why the old board insisted on another audit. In total, the cooperative is spending more than $150,000 on audits this year. The extra audit and the harassment of management are two reasons the old board had to go, Pilgrim-Hunter and other Fordham Hill shareholders said.

The board action that first provoked the shareholders ire, however, was a plan to restructure security at Fordham Hill. The board approved a plan that would have cut the presence of live security guards drastically and replaced them with a high-tech electronic system. Many shareholders argued that the presence of live security guards is the cooperative’s best amenity and main selling point.

Initially, the board wanted to implement the plan over the winter without putting it to a shareholder vote. But pressure from shareholders and Pilgrim-Hunter’s newly-formed opposition group, the Concerned Shareholders of Fordham Hill, forced the board to hold a referendum on the plan. Shareholders ultimately rejected the restructuring proposal.

The controversy agitated shareholders and revealed a deep rift in the board between a slate of five members and the other four members. The majority slate was approving plans and actions with little input from other board members, shareholders and non-slate board members said. The situation deteriorated in such a way that then-president Lena Townsend, originally a slate member, resigned from the board last December in protest of the slate’s unilateral decision-making process.

Townsend and others agreed that the only way to stop the board was to replace it. With that in mind, Pilgrim-Hunter created a slate of her own and called her group the New Vision candidates.

As the election heated up, anonymous flyers and mailings began circulating. A postal investigation found that one of the anonymous mailings, which Pilgrim Hunter said amounted to a full-scale assault on the New Visions candidates, led back to the City College office where Pereta Rodriguez (a member of the old board) works. Attempts to reach Rodriguez for comment were unsuccessful by press time.

Gloria Marshall, a shareholder and member of the election committee, was pleased with the results of the election process, which she characterized as the most controversial in her 20 years at Fordham Hill. Marshall supports the new board and said she liked Pilgrim-Hunter because "she’s a mover and a shaker."

Suffering from laryngitis, Townsend, in an e-mail, said she also held high hopes for the new board. "There was obviously a huge amount of support for the new board and I think shareholders will be supportive in what, I’m sure, will be a challenging transition," Townsend wrote.

Pilgrim-Hunter is now trying to meet with the old board to talk about that transition, but she said they’ve been reluctant thus far.

Members of the slate of the old board members refused to talk with the Norwood News for this article.