Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Next Meeting - August 23

Your humble correspondent has grown lax about giving advance notice of HOA meetings. So I thought I'd start early for August's. It's set for the 23rd, lightning permitting!

Looking further ahead, we will have elections for the HOA board seats this November. All five seats are up for grabs and two members -- David Hey and Beth Burns -- will not run again. If you want to play a role in safeguarding your community, consider serving on the board.

There's a meeting every month and a little homework in between but it's not arduous work and it pays great.**

**The pay is in sunshine.

HOA Meeting Tonight

The meeting happens 7 p.m. at the usual location -- River of Life Christian Church, 6605 Krycul Ave., Riverivew. Scroll further down the page for a map, if you need one. It's less than one mile from our front entrance.

We have a lot of issues to deal with because lightning forced cancellation of June's meeting. Scroll down a bit to see what we had planned to discuss at that one.

In addition, the community's insurance agent will brief us on our policy renewal coming up in August. Based on the Florida legislature's industry-friendly actions this year, the news for us could be bad.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Fireworks are Illegal

Yes, I know. There's a huge tent in the Sweetbay parking lot across US-301 selling them, so what's with the headline?

Here's the thing: Because of a quirk in state law, communities are not allowed to ban the sale of fireworks in the state. But they're not legal to set off unless you're using them to scare birds away from farm crops or fish hatcheries, light the way for a railroad, or to take them out of state.

I'm not making that up.

And that waiver you have to sign probably lists only the state statute numbers, but it says you agree that you're only going to use them for one of the reasons above. The waiver does not protect you one iota from liability for any damage you cause. It protects only the seller, who can pull out the form you signed and say, "hey, he said he was only going to use them legally."

I know that regardless of the law and regardless of the pleas of neighbors whose children and pets get scared at the sound of the explosions, there will be idiots who think they have to put on a show inside a densely populated community like ours where they truly don't belong.

I sincerely hope that you are not one of them.