EW4 (West Virginia)
Posts: 95
Posts: 95
Posted:
Hello –
I am a Director on my HOA. We have 114 homes total. We own the roads for all but 6 of the homes. Roads are 10-15 years old and well maintained but showing the wear. We do have a road fund that is well managed but is never going to be big enough to replace the roads. We do have capital improvement language in our C&R’s that will allow us to raise funding (requires 75% community approval).
We are building a road maintenance plan which should have been done several years ago. Politics prevented much of the planning until recently. We finally voted in favor of issuing an RFP to have our roads, shoulders, and ditches evaluated. Fortunately, two of us are experienced with RFPs and my counterpart more so in this particular area. He did something similar several years ago for another community.
Our plan is to have contractors bid to do the evaluation. Interested contractors will have to walk the community to ensure all understand and bid “apple to apples”. The board will select the best qualified submission and get the evaluation so that we have a professional assessment of short, mid and long term fixes and costs. The follow on work is not guaranteed to the winner of the evaluation contract.
We want to be able to fix the roads early before problems out of control. Politically, there are directors that want to fix the roads only when something comes up and in the meantime raise HOA fees to the max allowed by state law now in case something comes up. And keep raising the annual fee as the CPI goes up and use the Capital improvement to cover the gap.
That said, is there anyone who has done this recently within their community? Any advice or gotchas that you learned? Those of us who are working on this want to get this right so any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
I am a Director on my HOA. We have 114 homes total. We own the roads for all but 6 of the homes. Roads are 10-15 years old and well maintained but showing the wear. We do have a road fund that is well managed but is never going to be big enough to replace the roads. We do have capital improvement language in our C&R’s that will allow us to raise funding (requires 75% community approval).
We are building a road maintenance plan which should have been done several years ago. Politics prevented much of the planning until recently. We finally voted in favor of issuing an RFP to have our roads, shoulders, and ditches evaluated. Fortunately, two of us are experienced with RFPs and my counterpart more so in this particular area. He did something similar several years ago for another community.
Our plan is to have contractors bid to do the evaluation. Interested contractors will have to walk the community to ensure all understand and bid “apple to apples”. The board will select the best qualified submission and get the evaluation so that we have a professional assessment of short, mid and long term fixes and costs. The follow on work is not guaranteed to the winner of the evaluation contract.
We want to be able to fix the roads early before problems out of control. Politically, there are directors that want to fix the roads only when something comes up and in the meantime raise HOA fees to the max allowed by state law now in case something comes up. And keep raising the annual fee as the CPI goes up and use the Capital improvement to cover the gap.
That said, is there anyone who has done this recently within their community? Any advice or gotchas that you learned? Those of us who are working on this want to get this right so any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.