I was out of town during the July meeting, but a friend of mine kindly volunteered to attend and take notes.  That trip is also the cause of the delay in posting this.  There are several issues on which I am doing more research, but I did not want to hold this up any further.

Long Range Plan

If you have any interest in this at all, please note the following time line. It deals with the subject of community review and comment which has not, to my knowledge, been previously addressed.

The Long Range Plan Committee intends to give a first draft of the plan to the Board for its review and discussion by mid to late September. The Board will then give preliminary approval to the plan at the October 15 meeting.

Prior to the Annual General Meeting (AGM) in November, the plan preliminarily approved by the Board will be made available to all residents and also presented at the AGM itself. During this time period, comments can be directed to the Board. Then, sometime after the annual meeting, the Board will review and give final approval to the plan.

Therefore, community residents will have the opportunity to offer comments prior to the Board giving its final approval.

Property Outside Front Gates

This issue was brought up in last month’s meeting. The issues discussed can be found at the end of that meeting summary:  June 2012 Meeting Summary

At this meeting, the Board decided to authorize a Board member to pursue making an offer on both the building and the adjoining vacant land. No specific decisions were made as to the source of payment for any possible purchase. It was felt that, if purchased, the building would probably be demolished.

Front Gate to Manly Road Project

An engineer has been engaged to create an engineering/bid package. This will contain all the necessary information to allow contractors to bid the job. It is still hoped that this package will be ready by October and that bids will be in hand by December. When the engineering/bid package is completed, we should receive some preliminary cost estimates from that engineer.

However, the anticipated cost of the project will not be known until the bids are received. Should the cost be in excess of the funds we currently have set aside, the Board will consider delaying the project, breaking it up into smaller pieces or borrowing money. Although it was again not specifically mentioned in the meeting, there is always the option of an assessment to cover any shortfall.

Supervision of Front Gate to Manly Project

I touched on this issue briefly in a perspective posted last month linked here:  Infrastructure Perspective

Any project of this size will normally use a professional project manager; whose job would be to directly manage the contractor and the construction contract. This would be a professional with the requisite experience and expertise to handle such work, and they are charged with looking out for our (the resident’s) interests over the course of construction.

This project manager can be a direct hire or an outside consultant. For this project, the Board has decided that it will hire an outside engineering firm to be the project manager. In addition, they voted to create an ad-hoc committee to be chaired by our community manager, Jeff Allen, and consisting of an unspecified number of residents along with a Board liaison. This committee, to be called the Governors Drive Reconstruction Project Committee, will engage the project manager and then presumably oversee and manage that project manager.

Revision of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions

This is a very important, long range project that deserves everybody’s attention. A summary of this issue was posted in the Splinters column, but I will be writing a separate background paper which I believe will help people better understand why this effort is being undertaken.

It will take me another few weeks to do this, and I will send it out in a separate post with the information. This is not time sensitive, so the delay will not be an issue.

Lystra Gate

If appears that the final cost of re-doing the Lystra gate will be around $43,000. This is well above the original estimate of $17,000 but below the more recently estimated range of $45,000 to $50,000.

Finance Committee

Mike Donoghue reported that the Finance Committee expected a “surplus of $100,000 at the end of the year assuming no unexpected emergency spending during the second half of the year”.

Three months ago, the Finance Committee forecasted being on budget for the year; including the budgeted $300,000 contribution to the road fund.  If we are now $100,000 ahead of that forecast, that would be good news.  I am still working on determining how this happened.  If there is anything further to report, I will do so in a separate post.

For anybody interested, the POA has resumed posting current financial statements on the web site.  Also, I have not forgotten my promise to do a summary explaining the financial statement format, but that will have to wait until next month or a separate post.

Annual Budget Process

In a previous meeting, the Board decided to make the annual budget available to all residents in mid October in advance of the annual general meeting. The Board and the committees are working towards this timetable. In this meeting, The Board announced that a series of workshops would be held in early September to allow interested residents to participate in and provide input into the budget process.

Advertising Sales – follow-up from last month’s meeting

Initially, the Board decided to hire a person part time to handle the advertising sales for the newsletter. That strategy will be discontinued, and Gloria Caracciola (our current office manager) will now handle this task.

Deer Management

The Board intends to continue the deer culling program during the regular hunting season this coming fall. In prior years, we had occasionally extended this activity outside the normal hunting season; called depredation hunts. The Board determined that, at this time, there was no reason to schedule any depredation hunts this season.

Marketing Committee

The Board has formed a new committee named the Marketing and Realtor Relations Committee. It will replace the former Marketing and PR Committee; from which the majority of members resigned this past May (details of which can be found at the end of the May summary here: May Meeting Summary ). The name change better reflects the intended focus of the committee; namely better relations with all realtors both inside and outside the gates.

Construction Truck Routing

The Board asked our community manager to come up with a plan to route heavy construction trucks to either of our gates depending on the location of the respective construction site. The idea is to require the trucks to use the gate closest to their construction site to minimize wear and tear on our roads.

Web Site Chat Room

As you have seen from the POA e-mail, the POA web site chat room is in beta testing and should be up and running by September or earlier. As noted in previous summaries, this is the site that will allow residents to post comments and to comments on other people’s posts.