How many things does your HOA own?

How many things (tools, tents, etc) does your HOA own?

I'm finding I have a need for a surprising variety of tools in order to perform contract administration. Just yesterday, I had a need to purchase a measuring wheel to do take some measurements in a park that we own. It'll be used a lot because I like to verify the estimates and it will come in handy for that.

For example: Vendor says that they will provide 120 cubic yards of material to fill a particular area to a depth of six inches. I like to verify the square footage of the area so I know whether or not the 120 cubic yards will actually fill it to six inches, or whether the 120 yards was a made up number that the vendor thought sounded good. The measuring wheel will help with that and allow us to do better work.

We own a few other things as well, like a pop up tent for park events, pin flags, flagging tape, clipboards, a comment box, and the like. I don't really like purchasing physical things because it doesn't seem to be the most efficient use of our funds, but they do come in handy.

What does your association own?

The only tangible things our HOA owns is a couple of key lockboxes for the pool and landscapers to access the pool and four A frame no public parking sings that we put up for game day events
at a nearby soccer park and college stadium.

Oh, it was way worse years ago. When I joined the Board, I discovered we rented a storage unit for $700/year, and went through it one day to clean and close it out. I found:

1) Easter bunny suit for playing easter bunny for the annual egg hunt
2) Lots of Easter supplies
3) Halloween decorations and related activities for the Halloween contest
4) Tons of plat maps for the association
5) Boxes of association financial records from 10 years ago
6) Speaker box for use as a PA system during association events
7) Boxes of cheap givewaway items from Oriental Trading Company

Lots and lots of junk. The records were hauled to a shredder and shredded. (Turns out that I shredded a bunch of old meeting minutes that we no longer have -- oops). The remaining stuff was hauled to the landfill and gotten rid of. The storage unit was closed out and we've saved a ton of cash by not paying for that.

I'm getting a small collection of HOA owned stuff though so we might need to reinvest in one someday in the future.

General rule of thumb: If it can't be fixed with duct tape then a professional needs to step in. There is no need for a HOA to own tools.

I wish. I asked a vendor to provide an proposal to increase the playchip depth in our playground to 12 inches (from about 4 that was currently there). The 12 inch depth is to meet ASTM standards for safety. He came back with a price and a total cubic yardage.

Turns out, he only increased the depth by an inch or two because he was "trying to save us cost". Had I had my measuring wheel, I could have quickly verified whether or not he was pulling our leg. When I found that he was, I could have had him fix the proposal or gone with a different vendor that did what we want.

We don't use that vendor anymore.

I would have called the vendor back out and borrowed their wheel to measure. That way you all would be in agreement what it was to be.