Choose civility? Columbia Association leaders just can’t seem to get along.

At every turn, there seems to be a new controversy with the Columbia Association’s leadership.

The governing board of the city founded on the principles of a harmonious community seems to have lost its civility.

Just in the last five years, a board member resigned after altering his signed agreement to abide by the association’s code of conduct; a top executive resigned amid a dispute with the board; board members filed tit-for-tat ethics complaints against each other, resulting in the ouster of three members; and police were called to escort an unruly community member protesting at a May 14 meeting.

“This is certainly the most shameful period of Columbia’s history I have ever seen,” Alan Klein, the former board member who modified his signed code-of-conduct agreement, said to applause at a recent meeting.

Within the Columbia Association’s board of directors, infighting is the order of the day and ethics complaints the new weapon of choice.

Some residents and community leaders say the conflict is the fault of a small group of malcontents on the board. In an effort to rein in unruly members, the board rewrote its ethics policy in September to create a mechanism for permanently removing individuals from the board. Three members were ousted through that process last month.

It wasn’t always this way in Columbia, though community members offer different explanations for what brought on such divisiveness. Some residents speculate it’s the natural resistance to change as an older generation faces an influx of newcomers not interested in the status quo. Others say it echoes the national political polarization and culture where people no longer respect one another.

Columbia’s governance differs significantly from other cities in Maryland. Rather than a government, the unincorporated community is overseen by an outsize homeowners’ association as envisioned by pioneering real estate developer James Rouse when he designed the planned community in the 1960s.

The nation then was in the midst of a divisive era, not unlike today. Rouse intended for Columbia’s governance to be different from the adversarial politics and political machines that were prevalent at the time, said David Stebenne, co-author of the book “New City Upon a Hill: A History of Columbia, Maryland.”

“He thought residents would be committed to reasoned discourse,” said Stebenne, who grew up in Columbia and is now a professor of history and law at Ohio State University.

Rouse wanted residents to control the nonprofit association that now has a $91 million budget and oversees athletic facilities, day care, entertainment and recreational trails. Residents of Columbia’s 10 villages elect one member each to represent them on the association’s overarching board of directors.

Nearly 60 years after the community’s founding, Columbia is nearing Rouse’s target population of 110,000, yet few people participate in the association’s elections and even fewer run for the volunteer leadership positions. The board skews older and white in a community that’s growing more diverse.

“Figuring out compromises has become harder,” Stebenne said. “Money’s tighter than it used to be, both individually and in the government. It puts more strain on people’s civility and problem-solving skills.”

Amid the division, the association has had a revolving door of executives — four in the past six years — and lost key staffers.

One of those executives, Lakey Boyd, resigned in 2023 amid strong disagreements with the board about her diversity initiatives.

The constant fighting also makes it harder to convince young people to get more involved in Columbia’s elected leadership, said Joan Lancos, a former Columbia Association member for Hickory Ridge who has worked hard to engage more people in the annual elections.

“I think there could be effort all the way around,” Lancos said of the board’s behavior. “There are members on either side who have become so cemented in place, they refuse to have productive conversations.”

Even amid the vitriol, the board has made serious attempts at increasing transparency and accountability.

When Klein’s peers discovered he had deleted sections of his agreement to abide by the association’s code of conduct, they set out to overhaul the ethics policy. Klein said he knows what he did was wrong, but not agreeing to the code of conduct was a way of “thumbing his nose” at the weaponization of the ethics process.

Last year, Eric Greenberg of River Hill — who was board chair during Boyd’s ouster — Reg Avery of Long Reach and Karin Emery of Oakland Mills filed an ethics complaint concerning an evaluation of association CEO and President Shawn MacInnes’ job performance.

Greenberg had given MacInnes several zero ratings during what was supposed to be a confidential spring evaluation. He accused board members Collin Sullivan of Town Center and Bill Santos of Wilde Lake of leaking it. The association’s newly created ethics panel concluded the complaint was frivolous and unfounded.

After the ethics panel rejected the complaint by Greenberg, Avery and Emery, Sullivan filed his own complaint, accusing the trio of weaponizing the ethics process. The ethics panel determined that Greenberg, Avery and Emery acted in bad faith when they lodged their complaint and that Greenberg’s views were widely known.

The board had rewritten its ethics rules in September. This time, rules barred board members from submitting bad faith complaints to the ethics panel. It also added a more permanent consequence: Any person removed from the board is ineligible for reappointment.

Greenberg, Avery and Emery voted against the motion.

They were kicked off the board last month. After the ouster, they issued a statement calling their removal retribution for filing the original ethics complaint. They subsequently sued their counterparts, alleging their ouster violated the association’s charter and bylaws.

Former board member Dick Boulton, who represented Dorsey’s Search until 2023, has concerns with the new ethics policy, which he said the board can now use to remove fellow directors who don’t agree with them.

Boulton spent most of his tenure pushing for a rewrite of the former ethics code, but the changes that are now in place are not what he had in mind.

“My biggest concern in what they rewrote is the possibility of using it for retaliation,” Boulton said. “The expulsion piece should be for really vile things like embezzlement, sexual harassment, not small slap-on-the-wrist things.”

But the new ethics policy may be essential to reducing strife by allowing members to remove troublesome peers. Going forward, the new policy calls for more transparency through an annual public report summarizing ethics violations.