Barony Place I/Barony Place II

At the September 10th board of directors meeting, chaos ensued at the end of the meeting when President Danny Trapp made an announcement about the Projects Committee. He stated he was dissolving the Projects Committee and moving it out of the Finance Committee. Then he said that (Secretary) Tanisha Holmes had agreed to chair the Projects Committee. A woman's voice (VP Brenda Bryant?) could be heard ask if the Board had to vote on that, and Danny said it did not. She should have called "Point-of-Order" and asked the board to vote on whether Danny could appoint a committee chair without the board's vote. Director Dennis Rybicki said Danny couldn't do that (dissolve the Projects Committee) because it was a Standing Committee. Actually, it's not. It is listed as an "Other Committee" (PRM, Art. II Section C(2)), following the section on Standing Committees. Considerable argument and disagreement followed. Danny said the Project Committee hadn't been d...

On July 14, 2020 I wrote the first post for this blog, and the count is now 750 posts. I have found many things that the homeowners in The Summit's HOA should know about operations of the HOA and actions by the successive boards of directors. Most of my posts have to do with the HOA's operations and are wider than just the Barony Place Neighborhood. Please share this blog with others. Use the "Share" button at the top-right and bottom-left of each post. Just enter the email of the person (or people) you'd like to share this with. No record is kept of your sharing a post or of the email address to which you send it. I'd love for 200-300-500 homeowners to read what "their" HOA is doing.  Remember to attend board meetings. Usually (but not always) the first Tuesday of the month. So, Oct. 1, and then Nov. 12.

Do you claim to be a "Voting Member" of The Summit's HOA? Is your name listed in The Summit Scoop? Is your name listed on the HOA's website under Voting Members? Are you a legitimate Voting Member? How did you become a Voting Member? Did you "get signatures"? The office provides a form for you to use. The on-site property manager told a Chapelwood resident at the September 10th board meeting to pick up such a form. Did you assume the role of Voting Member when the previous Voting Member moved or retired or died or just quit? Have you been the Voting Member for years and just kept doing it? Were you elected 25 years ago and your Neighborhood just never had another Neighborhood Meeting? Or did your Neighborhood, within the past year,  hold a Neighborhood Meeting and, after ascertaining that a quorum was present (1/3 of the homes being represented in-person or by proxy), elect three homeowners to the Neighborhood Committee, and then did that Committee elect one...

The Minutes of the September 10, 2024 regular board meeting have been published. Presumably, they were reviewed by the on-site property manager and the board before they were published. In Resident Concerns, the name of the Chapelwood Neighborhood is misspelled as "Chaplewood". Why? The Chapelwood resident asked specific questions about how a voting member is selected. She was given completely erroneous information by the on-site property manager, and none of the six board members corrected it. "Getting signatures" is not a method that is recognized in the By-Laws. There is only one (1) way to become a legitimate Voting Member. See the By-Laws, Art. V, Section 3. A $4,800 bid from Washington Masonry was approved to replace a brick wall damaged in an auto accident. The date and location of the accident were not mentioned. Becca Brindle, CPA, finished the external audit ($3,500) and will present to the board "later this month". That means, to the board at it...

The Board of Directors seems impotent when it comes to controlling the President of the HOA. Why does this state of affairs continue? Upon information and belief, members of the board are not allowed to contact the HOA's attorney. Only the President can do so. Who says?  (The President says so.) On the one hand, it is good that six (should be seven) are not all contacting the attorney for advice. The legal bill would go out-of-sight. On the other hand, when members of the board have questions about legal issues and can't get answers, is the HOA at risk of increased liability and expense? The biggest issue is probably the lack of legitimate Voting Members, because the Board of Directors is not helping the 28 Neighborhoods to comply with the By-Laws by holding Annual Neighborhood Meetings. Only one Neighborhood has a legitimate Voting Member . The President disbanded the board's Neighborhood Committee as one of his first acts. Of course, the BOD can prove me wrong by assertin...

Should the Minutes of monthly Board meetings be correct? Is "almost correct" good enough? What mistakes should be tolerated? Any? Should Minutes be corrected before the Board approves them? I think I've been to only one Board meeting in five years, where a member of the Board asked for a correction to be made. The Minutes have been better-prepared in the past couple of months. Before that, there was no excuse for the Minutes of a business meeting to be published as they were. As I understand it, if the Minutes are written by the #2 person in the HOA office, then the on-site property manager reviews them before they are sent to the directors. The directors are supposed to read them and reply with any corrections. Then the Minutes are published on the website, so that homeowners (Members of the HOA) know what happened at the previous meeting. This should happen within 7-10 days of a meeting. (It's September 27th, and the Minutes of the September 10th meeting have not ye...

When the 2024 HOA Budget was approved, Line Item 6005 (On-Site "Maintenance") was $150,000. That's $12,500 monthly.  Line Item 6005 had been mis-titled for years, and I complained about it continually. None of the previous three Treasurers would correct it. Line 6005 was for the CAMS employees in the office and other contracted labor services. It was NOT On-site "Maintenance"; it was On-Site Management (and some maintenance). Finally, in February 2024 the Line Item was re-named "On-Site Staff". The HOA itself has no employees. The amount approved by the Board for 2024 was $150,000. The 2024 Budget, posted online, verifies this. The monthly amount for that Line was $12,500. Here is the breakdown for the expenditures for Line Item 6005 for first seven months of 2024: $    14,729.72 January $    15,209.02 February $    13,573.89 March $    12,909.98 April $    14,617.02 May $    15,140.93 June $    14,930.14 July $...