Resident lawn care complaints

Hi All, I am wondering if anyone has found a way to channel resident complaints about regular lawn care contractor? Last year we had to let a contractor go due to substandard performance. We rebid and hired a new contractor for this service this year. I think our residents were in shock about the previous year's performance so when the new contractor started this year some of the resident's seemed to tend to micro-manage the performance with complaints to the board, the property manager and even calling the contractors office and complaining to the office staff, or stopping the contractor's workers to complain about how they were doing the job. The situation made the new contractor feel that he may not want to continue with us after this season even though we have a multi year contract. We also have one board member who takes it upon himself to complain and we are having to try to curtail that tendency.

We have attempted to channel such complaints to the property manager, which is probably the answer but it has been a frustrating situation and as a 5 year president it makes me wonder if I want to continue in this role.

I am probably venting with this post more than anything, but if anyone has any constructive suggestions I would appreciate them.

Robert, lawn care service is the number one complaint in our community and from what I hear this is normal. We have 165 condos and sitting on 31 acres. Our lawn care contract is for the very small grass area around each condo and 10 acres of open common area. We get complaints left and right. Recently, we have been addressing this via educating the home owners. If you break our contract down each condo owner is paying $22 per month to cover their condo and the 10 acre common area. Now when someone brings this up we ask them the following questions:

1.) If you lived in a single family resident how much would it cost to have someone mow your lawn once a week?
2.) Knowing that you pay $22 a month tell me exactly what level of service you are expecting?
3.) Are you prepared for a sizable increase in your regime fee so that you can get the level of lawn care that you desire?
4.) (This may not apply to you.) Knowing that our Reserve funds are not adequate to cover future cost such as painting and roads, would you still vote for a regime fee increase if part of it was going to lawn care?

We have been taking this approach in our open meetings and it has been very effective. Sometimes residents just need to understand the overall situation better. Others will always complain and that's just the way it is. The bottom line is spend the time that it takes to educate your residents. Before you start this, get some bids for a contract that has all the bells and whistles and then present the residents what their new bill is and ask them if they are prepared to pay up.

If your contractor is not providing the services outlined in your contract then the residents have a valid complaint. My question to you would be, is the new contractor honoring what he is suppose to do? If he is, you need to back him up and educate the homeowners the way I have described. If he's not, that's a board problem.