Homeowners Association 101

When you buy a house in a new subdivision or planned unit development, you may be subject to a host of rules and regulations! Are you shocked yet? I know many of you are, because I get more complaints about the dreaded words "Homeowners Association" or the HOA! I have noticed that there is a typical pattern that HOA's tend to follow over the years.

It starts with the village stepping in to beat up the developer, because of homeowner complaints. The developer runs the HOA until a certain percentage of occupancy is met. Then usually because the village forced the developer to turn over the HOA to the residents the problems and complaints shift to the new "resident board". Usually the first thing that happens is the new HOA board decides the old management company (usually a creature of the developer) needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Then the board goes through a shake out and some energetic resident leadership takes over and things tend to smooth out and normalcy returns.

Some of the things you will look for from your HOA are:

• Maintenance: Once a developer'’s responsibility has expired, the owners have to pay for repairs when things start to break down. Having an adequate reserve and a planned maintenance program is essential to preserving the community and your property'’s value.
• Fees and Assessments: Generally, homeowners associations levy mandatory monthly fees to maintain common property, such as lawns, swimming pools, hiking trails, golf courses, or tennis courts Fees may increase as expenses rise and special assessments may also be imposed for major costs such as a new roof for a community sports center or private street repair.
• Liens and foreclosures: If you fail to pay your association dues, or run afoul of its regulations, you can be charged a fine. A lien can even be imposed on your property resulting in potential foreclosure, sometimes over trivial amounts. If you dispute the charges in court and lose, you may also have to pay the association'’s legal fees.
• Governance: Most homeowners association board members are volunteers elected by the property owners. Sometimes inexperience can cause mistakes, resulting in additional expenses. Often, more than 50 percent of the dues collected by an association are used to pay for the management companies and attorneys it employs.
• Regulations: Together with their management partners, homeowners associations function very much as private governments. Once property owners sign a contract agreeing to comply with an association'’s laws, that often supersedes their individual property rights. It'’s not easy to change community regulations imposed by a homeowners association. To do so generally requires the approval of the majority of members.

My mayoral radar tells me this will be a lively debate on the comment section of my blog so I promise to blog further on the subject since I am sure I will get some ideas from the feedback. A couple of interesting facts on HOA's are that they are:

• The fastest growing form of government in the US in the last 15 years.
• 1 in 6 Americans live in a HOA environment.
• There are at least 20 HOA's in Round Lake.
• The Village has taken over one HOA, Bright Meadows! By the way the residents requested it.

Route 60 Commercial Development

A long time reader Graham Little emailed me and asked about what's going on at 60 and Arden. So since I needed a post, I thought this was an excellent topic for the blog.

When the Lakewood homes development was on the drawing board, we were faced with a few choices. The major choice was the boards insistence that there be a significant investment in 60 and the new Cedar Lake Road. The second choice was our insistence on 30 acres in commercial set asides. At that time the village had a grand total of 43 acres (Fairfield and 134, Madrona, Bright Meadows and Wilson Road) of available commercial acreage so this was a substantial gain.

We could have demanded more commercial, but at a trade off for the Route 60 and Cedar Lake road project. In addition we originally wanted 40 acres together, but logistically this was not possible, so we settled for the the split site that currently exists, with 11 acres at the corner of 60 and Cedar Lake called Cedar Commons and the 20 acres on the South side of 60.

The project called Cedar Commons had a checkered history with the original developer being sued in every county in the area for all sorts of things it seemed like, and of course us having nothing happening until Lakewood could extricate themselves from the contract to market what is today Cedar Commons.

In the last few months we have made some excellent progress on the 26 acres and in fact are very close to getting final approvals for 26 acres of some very attractive stores and offices! This proposal has 192,000 sq ft of retail and office, along with a new signalized interesection. I am very excited by this project. The graphic above is of one of the proposed buildings as of a few weeks ago.

If anyone wants me to email the two PDF files of the development plans please email me and I will send you a copy.

More Bike Racing Today

Interesting day today, I am going to see the 1 day Inaugural Grayslake Cycling Classic at Prairie Crossing in Grayslake. It's Chicagoland's newest and most unique criterium, featuring a fast, flat horse-shoe shaped 1.1 mile course! There are all sorts of age group and gender related races throughout the day with the professionals riding last around 4pm.

I have often thought the village of Round Lake should sponsor a race, although my thinking was a 5K run through Round Lake's neighborhoods, the logistical problems are bigger then you would imagine. How do you cross Fairfield, and 120? I think it would be cool to race right down Cedar Lake through Bright Meadows, Madrona and into Lakewood, or then up to Valley Lakes. Although that might be a 10K. The other thought I had before one of the parades is run the Round Lake Mile...start at Washington and Cedar Lake and run north of Cedar Lake right over the hill and down into Round Lake Beach. Be kinda cool with all the people lining the route waiting for candy. I tried convincing the park district about that one, but no takers there!

I also thought of a beat the Mayor race for charity, but that might be to charitable, judging by my slow run this morning!

The Winners of the 2nd Annual Blog Giveaway!

I had 38 entries to the contest I announced a few days ago here. Which is almost double what I had last year. I had a good time with my draw system. I also think this is a nice idea to raffle off stuff that I win as Mayor. By the way cash I keep! Not that I win any of that!

Please note the picture has nothing to do with this post other then he is diving into a pool, he appears to need to workout and he should spend some cash on new shorts!

For those of you fascinated in the elaborate double blind system used to determine the winner. I sorted the emails by arrival date, the first email to arrive was number 1, the last to arrive was number 38. I then found this website and generated three random number between 1 and 38 which were 11, 4, and 14, then I counted down to number 14 on the email list and lo and behold I had a winner.

So with out further ado the winners of the prizes are:

• Family Pool Pass for the Round Lake Park District (you better have kids) valued at $135 dollars. The winner is Jeff Weiss of Madrona Ridge
• One Year Membership to the Round Lake Park District Fitness Center (Value $235)
  The winner is Mike Vanata of Valley Lakes.
  
• $50 in Rec Bucks, good for any Park District program and the winner is Paul Hollingworth of Bright Meadows.

Lets all hope I can get some more goodies to be distributed to my loyal readership.

Homeowners Associations-- A Short History

When you buy a house in a new subdivision or planned unit development, you may be subject to a host of rules and regulations! Are you shocked yet? I know many of you are, because I get more complaints about the dreaded words "Homeowners Association" or the HOA! I have noticed that there is a typical pattern that HOA's tend to follow over the years.

It starts with the village stepping in to beat up the developer, because of homeowner complaints. The developer runs the HOA until a certain percentage of occupancy is met. Then usually because the village forced the developer to turn over the HOA to the residents the problems and complaints shift to the new "resident board". Usually the first thing that happens is the new HOA board decides the old management company (usually a creature of the developer) needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Then the board goes through a shake out and some energetic resident leadership takes over and things tend to smooth out and normalcy returns.

Some of the things you will look for from your HOA are:

• Maintenance: Once a developer'’s responsibility has expired, the owners have to pay for repairs when things start to break down. Having an adequate reserve and a planned maintenance program is essential to preserving the community and your property'’s value.
• Fees and Assessments: Generally, homeowners associations levy mandatory monthly fees to maintain common property, such as lawns, swimming pools, hiking trails, golf courses, or tennis courts Fees may increase as expenses rise and special assessments may also be imposed for major costs such as a new roof for a community sports center or private street repair.
• Liens and foreclosures: If you fail to pay your association dues, or run afoul of its regulations, you can be charged a fine. A lien can even be imposed on your property resulting in potential foreclosure, sometimes over trivial amounts. If you dispute the charges in court and lose, you may also have to pay the association'’s legal fees.
• Governance: Most homeowners association board members are volunteers elected by the property owners. Sometimes inexperience can cause mistakes, resulting in additional expenses. Often, more than 50 percent of the dues collected by an association are used to pay for the management companies and attorneys it employs.
• Regulations: Together with their management partners, homeowners associations function very much as private governments. Once property owners sign a contract agreeing to comply with an association'’s laws, that often supersedes their individual property rights. It'’s not easy to change community regulations imposed by a homeowners association. To do so generally requires the approval of the majority of members.

My mayoral radar tells me this will be a lively debate on the comment section of my blog so I promise to blog further on the subject since I am sure I will get some ideas from the feedback. A couple of interesting facts on HOA's are that they are:

• The fastest growing form of government in the US in the last 15 years.
• 1 in 6 Americans live in a HOA environment.
• There are at least 20 HOA's in Round Lake.
• The Village has taken over one HOA, Bright Meadows! By the way the residents requested it.
  

New Director of Public Works

This Monday I appointed a new Director of Public Works Davis Clark. Davis has been with us for over a decade and was the most impressive candidate that we interviewed. Davis is a Round Lake resident (Bright Meadows) and is just what the village was looking for, aggressive, bright and full of ideas! Our former Director Charlie Olsen has moved to a newly created position as Superintendent of Roads reporting to the Director of Public Works. Please join me in welcoming Davis to the new corner office at the Public Works department!

Replacing the Meeting with a Mouse!

One of the most interesting things in my first term as mayor was the growth of homeowner driven discussion boards and then websites catering to the needs of the residents in those specific developments. The first one I was aware of came about from an active lady in Madrona Homes named Donna Bavido. There had been one that predated that in Valley Lakes (formed by a Gregorio Peck and Miquel Tortuga who have both moved I think, although I might be wrong) but it was rather slow at first. These virtual meeting rooms are the equivalent of neighbors leaning over the fence talking about things going on in the area.

The Daily Herald, Chicago Tribune and the Round Lake News did features on the phenomena quoting Donna and myself about 2 years ago.

I am currently aware of ones in Valley Lakes, Madrona Homes, and Bright Meadows. There are also websites that are companions to these sites as well. All of them are quite impressive with an enormous amount of excellent information available to the residents.

Please note I am sure I am unaware of some, so please email them and I will post them here. (bgentes@eroundlake.com)

Watering Restrictions as of Today

Davis Clark our water operator at Public Works in charge of water in the village talked to me today about a serious issue we have been facing due to the excessive dry spell. So what follows is the email and the information he gave me.

Acting on his recommendation, I gave him permission to institute water restrictions. Read below for the details.

Because of the high heat and little or no rain this month, the water usage in the Village has reached an all time high. Just in the last 3 weeks we have had 14 days in which the Village has pumped over 2 million gallons of water per day, 6 of those days were over 2.5 million, and 1 day reached 3 million gallons. The average daily use in the month of May was 1.2 million gallons. Because of this high water use I will be posting the Village ordinance pertaining to Landscape water use restrictions on the Village's web site, as well as asking the Valley Lakes, Madrona Village, and Bright Meadows web sites to spread the word on their web sites too. If our residents will do their watering in the late evening or early morning hours, we will be able to supply their water without further restrictions.

The Ordinance is as follows:

Ordinance #13.12.030 Landscape water use restrictions.

A. The use of water from the municipal water system for use in landscape irrigation from May 15th through September 15th of each year is prohibited between the hours of 12:01 pm and 6 pm, Monday through Friday, except that newly sodded or seeded areas of lawns may be watered at any time for a two-week period following installation of such sod or planting of such seed.

B. From Monday through Friday, outside water use shall be further restricted, as follows:

Occupants with even-numbered residences or other structures will be permitted to water lawns and gardens, wash cars and vehicles and use water for outside use only on even-numbered days; occupants with odd-numbered residences or other structures will be permitted to water lawns and gardens, wash cars and vehicles and use water for outside use only on odd-numbered days. (Prior code § 6.13 (b)).

As I post this its actually raining a wee bit! Hopefully it will be enough!