What am I paying for?

“What am I even paying for every month” is something we hear a lot. Every resident has to remember that the board is not some authority sitting in an office somewhere waiting to field calls and serve the whims of every community member who has a single loose shingle on their roof. We are all in this together and the board is here to represent you and you’ve chosen us to make tough decisions for the good of the community as a whole. Sometimes your neighbors are going to get service while you have to wait. We know that’s frustrating to see but you need to think of monthly dues more like insurance payments and less like payments for a service.

In the winter of 2019 we made it clear to the community that mismanagement of HOA funds over the course of many years has led to a situation where our reserves were being depleted and our main checking account was frequently being overdrawn.

Since then, the current board has made a lot of progress toward fixing that situation but in the fall of 2020 we made it clear that this process would take time and require patience from all of us. In less than a year we have built our reserves back up to a healthy level and are ending each month with at least some liquidity in our checking account.

However, it’s still not enough. We are able to fund a few small projects each year like the trim and painting we’ve been doing this year but there’s still a long way to go. Our roofing project, once funded, will take care of a lot of outstanding issues that many of us have been waiting on. That said, our income each month is simply not enough to fund more than one or two small to medium sized project per year. The only way to do that would be to raise dues or assess a one-special assessment.

Every single owner that has spoken out has made it clear that they are against raising dues and a special assessment of over $7,000 is not something anyone wants either. When this board took office we promised to do all that we could to keep dues frozen or at least very low and avoid a special assessment. We have been successful at that so far. But here’s the important thing to remember:

If you want more from your association, faster, then there will be no choice but to raise dues. We can either be patient and take ownership of our homes while we are raising funds for special project or we can go ahead and raise dues or a special assessment and you can have all your dreams come true immediately.

Those are the tough choices we are faced with. We’ve already come this far and made the progress we said we would so please be patient with us until we reach our goal of building a nest egg that can serve the needs of the community as issues arise.