08/30/2022
Neighbors,
Good evening, my name is Brian Nelson. I am the new President of our HOA by a meeting we held on Saturday August 20th. Our new Vice President is Anna Brown, and our Secretary is Lisa Nordberg.
Anna is new to the community, Lisa was one of the original buyers as were Kelly and I back in 1999...yep, back when many of us thought Y2K was the greatest threat to mankind. Seems rather benign in hindsight.
The new board has not met yet, but I felt like I wanted to reach out to you about some of the things we discussed at the meeting. I'll summarize them below:
Communication: Email, Newsletter, FaceBook page, taped notices on mailboxes
How should we communicate as a community? For most of us, anything that an HOA has to say is about 20th or lower on anyone's priority list, so the last thing we want to do is blast everyone with junk/spam or a latest baking recipe.
That said, there are times we need to reach everyone for things the community needs to know, needs to make a decision about, or an attempt to assemble everyone.
We agreed that we should have redundant forms of communication for our community--an example is I do not have email addresses for 14 of the 40 homes in our neighborhood--and a few of those are to landlords, not tenants.
Part of me would like to create a community address book, and I know much of that instinct comes from my 27 years in the Army. We called them 'Alert Rosters', and we had the names, email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers of everyone in the unit. I know we are not going to war--but part of me still believes this might come in handy for us one day.
Brayden Buikpour created a FaceBook page for our community. For those of you who use FaceBook to like the page here: Lake Louise Place Community
(sign of the times and diversity of our neighborhood...of the 13 people who came to the meeting, 4-5 of them said they do not use FaceBook at all..so social media cannot be the only communication plan we use.)
Lisa, our new Secretary, will also produce a newsletter. We have not decided on the distribution frequency.
New Committees - we are looking for people to volunteer
Community Garden Committee
Safety/Security Committee
CC&R/ByLaw review/update Committee
I'll be brief here. These are all things that I have thought about for the past few years, and the main reason I chose to run for president.
Community Garden. looking for 3-5 volunteers
I think this would be a great idea for us to consider--and create. Here are my main points:
1. Both inflation and scarcity are real. I have not seen sweet potatoes at Costco in months. The vegetables are hit and miss. We have property that is underused and ideal (lots of sun, with water) for us to create a community garden.
2. We will learn from each other. There are different skills sets among us, and we could broaden the items to grow, heck we could even have a mini-Famer's market to sell some of our produce if it gets bigger than we can eat ourselves.
3. We don't know each other. Some of us have lived nearby for 20+ years and do not even know each other's names. This would be something we would do together, and it will help us build a greater sense of community 'inside the wire'.
Safety/Security Committee: 3-5 volunteers
1. We have had severe weather conditions over the years that has knocked out power for 3-5 days, enough snow to make it treacherous to maneuver, and crime is on the rise.
2. We have vulnerable neighbors. Single people. Elderly. Those who do not speak English.
3. I would like to have a committee consider the likely and not so likely incidents that will impact the entire community, and create a few plans/courses of action to enact under such situations. One small example is that when we get our next snowstorm, I would like to know that we have 3-5 hale people who ensure all of the most vulnerable neighbors have their driveways/porches shoveled in a timely manner.
We have been doing this for each other over the years, but there has been a lot of turn over in the past 24 months. I would prefer to have thought some things out and create some teams to ensure everyone is safe.
CC&R/ByLaw review/update Committee: 3-5 people
1. I'm pretty sure our CC&Rs/ByLaws were produced via a template in 1999. I doubt many of us have taken a good look at the CC&Rs/ByLaws to see if they remain relevant.
2. I think it would be worth have 3-5 people read through these deliberately, and to consider any changes we would like to make to the 'laws' that we use to govern ourselves. Years ago there was an idea to make this community an 'owners only' community. We voted that down because it limits the flexibility for the homeowners to use their primary investment/wealth builder. One idea might be to consider a percentage of homes that must be owner/occupant for example.
Ok, that was longer than I had intended, but I wanted to get some thoughts out sooner than later.
If any of you are interested in participating in the committee ideas proposed, please respond here. If you're interested in doing a community garden, but do not want to be on any committee-please let me know that as well. I've reached out to the city to talk with the planners to ensure any plans we have are within Lakewood City Ordinances--and to ask if there is anything we can do with the pond/waste water area in our community.
Thank you for your time, and have a great week.
bsn
VR,
Brian S. Nelson
You matter. You belong. We need you at your best. Let's get to work.
