Actions Taken at HOA Meeting

In a lightly attended meeting last night, some of the same issues the St. Charles Place HOA board has heard before cropped up again. Our property manager was on vacation and did not attend, so some questions owners raised remain unanswered.

The board approved a bid from AIO Services to clean out our gutters. Finally! The failure of our property manager to take care of this sooner despite repeated requests caused frustration among some board members.

A couple pieces need to fall into place before the new security and card key system goes into effect at the pool. When it does, your key will not open the pool gates. The HOA will mail out new key cards by certified mail. This does mean, unfortunately, that we will all have to trek to the post office to sign for them.

The board has requested that the property manager get bids on seal coating and striping our streets and parking lots. It will cause some inconvenience when it happens, but it’s past time to do this preventive maintenance to extend the lifespan of our paved roads.

One owner on Great Carlisle Court mentioned cars parked on the street making it difficult for her to get out of her home. Our community documents prohibit street parking, and the offending cars can get towed after ticketing.

The problem enforcing the rule is that none of the board members live in that area, and if the property manager writes tickets on one of his two monthly visits, he has no way to follow up, and the board members have no way to know which cars to have towed away.

To that end, board member John McQuiston (also your humble blog author) asked whether the board could form a traffic committee consisting of non-board members who could write tickets and call for towing. That way someone on Great Carlisle affected by the issue, and willing to help combat it, could do so.

One owner expressed concern about darkened streets due to light outages. Tampa Electric maintains all the streetlights in the community, and anyone can report ones that are out. Every light has two rows of numbers plainly visible on the pole. Simply enter those numbers on this page on the TECO website: https://secure.tampaelectric.com/tampaelectricsecure/forms/residential/streetlightout/ and TECO will take care of it.

TECO crews do non-emergency repairs on a fixed schedule, so if it’s our turn, the light could come back on the next day. Or it could take a month. But any one of us has a simple way to report lights out.

One owner worries about trees hanging close to his property. The board has a list of trees that it plans to have trimmed, or removed if necessary. If you have one that you think poses a danger, email the board (board@stcharlesplace.us) so we can add that tree to the list if it’s not there already.

As it was, a brief but strong storm August 21 blew down part of a tree on a neighboring property onto a couple of units on Marble Fawn Place. Our buildings withstood the blows and a tree service cut the parts of the tree apart and took them away the next day.

I think that the neighbor whose tree caused us to pay the tree service should bear responsibility for that cost. It’s a question the board has put to our property manager.

Finally, and something I will write about again, at least one board member says he will not run again when elections happen October 28. Another prefers not to run if a replacement will volunteer.

That means we need people to step up and serve. If we don’t have a board, our HOA could go into what’s called receivership, and we’d pay lawyers truckloads of money to do what our fellow homeowners currently do for free.

For the same reason, we need 30% of eligible owners to show up or return proxy forms for the annual meeting. So make plans to attend, or at least keep an eye on your mailbox for the proxy form. You can sign it, scan it and email it back to the board.