HOA with 90 ft circle lots, common area driveway repair

Oregon HOA with 90 foot circle lots, nearly all have their driveway go through some portion of common area outside of the circle before entering the street. A few of the 37 year old exposed aggregate driveways are breaking up in the common portion. We currently have no language giving responsibility to the property owner on that portion. We are assuming then that we repair common area portions of driveways outside of the property circle.

Has anyone encountered this circumstance, and how did your board proceed? Any advice is welcome!

James,

Without seeing the plat and the easements, my guess would be that your association should be responsible for all portions of the drives that are on common area plus those portions (if any) that may be on private property but used by other property owners.

Assuming that your association's intent is to restore the appearance of the subdivision it may be best to replace all driveways regardless of ownership. The reason for doing so is that if the association leaves it up to the individual homeowners, most of them will never get around to replacing the driveways. The drives that do get replaced will not likely match the new driveways. There also may be some economy of scale in doing it all at once instead of piecemeal. Take the bull by the horns and just do it.

Right now, we have two properties with "damage" resulting from usage over 37 years, in the common area. We don't consider a long crack that hasn't risen on one side to be damage. When it turns into a separate piece, that's when we look at repair/replacement. If the cracks have opened up into mini canyons, we look to fill in with epoxy.

Out of 109 HOs, we have two slab section replacement candidates, and maybe five epoxy fixes. We wouldn't expect more than one inquiry a year at this rate. Total cost for these fixes right now looks to be about $11,000. We can afford that.