Gleneagles Neighborhood

1 month ago

Hello neighbors!

Warning this is a long post.

In the coming month you should be receiving the notice for our annual meeting. With the notice will be a couple of things. I would like to take the time to address some of these items, so you understand the what and why.

The first is the annual budget. Please review when received as this is the budget that has been approved by the board and will be used to guide us in our finances over the next fiscal year for the association.

Next is that we will be making a suggested by-laws change. As a board we are to create an election committee before the annual meeting to present to the association of potential candidates to join the board, to then be voted on at the annual meeting. Over the multiple years that I have been on the board and my predecessors, this has always been a struggle. According to the by-laws we are allowed to take nominations from the members present at the annual meeting. We are suggesting that we eliminate the need to the election committee and keeping the nominations from the floor. You will always be allowed to be added to the ballot before the annual meeting if you wish, in fact we welcome it. We would like to streamline the process some and get rid of a normally good idea but proves to be more complicated than it needs to be.

Now for the last piece. We are raising association dues for the first time since we have become an association (15 years ago). A lot of things have changed over that time and some of the changes are a direct result of initiatives by the board over the past few years. All of initiatives have been necessary and for the good of our property values and the neighborhood. The board has talked about the amounts to raise dues at length and have struggled to balance the funds needed for the association and not going overboard with an excess of funds. What has changed that we need to raise dues after all this time?

The first item is that in the past our accounts receivable (AR) was ok, 85%, but we had some past due items that allowed us to receive late fees and other subsequent fees. These fees were counted in our budget as income and offset some of our expenses. However, with a much-concerted effort over the past 4 years, we are averaging about 95+% AR collection rate. This is awesome, we are receiving dues on time, but we are missing the late fees as income. As a result, we no longer count late fees as income. Losing the amount of late fees was a big ding to our finances as those values were considerable at one time.

The next item is that we have added some improvements to the neighborhood over the last few years. The biggest of which are new street signs/poles and soon to be irrigation in the medians. We were able to fund these without any special assessments. Woo Hoo! At some point in the future these items and others will need to be replaced as a result we created an end of life account a few years ago. This account includes a set payment that we pay ourselves (the membership) so that when the time comes to replace a capital item (fences, median trees, signs, irrigation, etc.) we can do so without the need to do a special assessment or increase dues once again. The amount needed to fund the account has nearly doubled from past years.

Finally, the cost of doing business has not decreased over the years instead it has increased. In every category that we fund we have had an increase over the past 17 years. Expenses have increased but the money coming in has not changed.
All the above factors have led to the decision to increase our dues. The new dues will start with the first fiscal year quarterly dues in June of 2018. This increase will be as follows. If you currently pay $25 a quarter this will be increased to $35 a quarter or about $3 more monthly. If you currently pay $37.50 a month this will change to $52.50 a quarter or $5 more a month. Why the disparity in charges? Our governing documents force us to not have a uniform dues structure which proves more difficult to change than the By-Laws.

Being members of the association ourselves, the board strives to be good stewards of our association finances. Making the decision to raise dues was not taken lightly nor were the amounts arbitrary. It has taken months of research and running numbers to come up with what we think is the best course of action for the future. We hope this is the only time that dues will need to be raised for another 17 years.

This post will be cross posted to Gleneagles Neighbors facebook group so we can have a conversation and the board will try to answer questions as we can. This is not because we do not want to discuss the issues but instead want to make sure that they are not out for the world to see.

Yours in service,
Aaron Seamans
President
Gleneagles Owners’ Association ...

Gleneagles Neighborhood

2 months ago

The monthly board meeting will be this Monday at the Bank of Lexington community room @ 7pm. If you have something specific you want to address to board about please contact your association president so we can put it on the agenda. ...