At what point should I stop volunteering?

As many of you know, we are a community of single family homes. We own a park system in our HOA consisting of 5 parks. The parks are all irrigated by well water and we own a system of 4 wells to provide water to the parks. These are traditional wells with depths that range from 130 to 560 feet deep. We own a cistern that includes float valves and booster pumps. Our irrigation system has approximately 54 separate valves that control the system. We have three play areas, including one zipline, 27 street lights, 24 cluster mailbox units, and two picnic areas.

Bottom line is something always needs maintenance. Once or twice per month, something is broken and needs to be serviced. We hire vendors to come out and do the work, but the vendors need direction. They need photographs of the problem, they need to know where the problem is located. Sometimes the vendors are too busy and then we have to find other vendors to come out. Some vendors want to charge too much and then we need to find affordable vendors. Bottom line is that it's constant Board volunteer time to coordinate the repairs.

We have had 3 separate water outage emergencies in the last 3 years. These are not fun - I have to spend a bit of my workday trying to coordinate emergency repairs to ensure our plants don't die.

I guess I'm wondering - at what point am I doing too much for free? Homeowners are growing used to me being a volunteer, and I can sense a air of entitlement among some of our homeowners. It seems to me that some have an attitude that they need to push me to volunteer more hours and more time to make our community better.

I guess I'm wondering - at what point do we need to hire a professional on site person who can handle all of this stuff, and insist that our homeowners need to pay for that person in the form of dues?

We currently have an offsite property manager who is not really effective at coordinating onsite repairs.

Unfortuantely, irrigation companies in our area don't work on wells. Well companies don't work on irrigation.

Some of the well repairs require extensive digging, which is not preferred by the well companies and they charge $165 an hour to dig dirt. So it is preferred by the well company that we hire the landscaper to do the dirt digging at $65 an hour. All of these requires coordination between the vendors which I am doing at $0 per hour.

You are exactly right and that is why I have mentioned several that all the work he has done is for nothing unless there is a long term solution such as a full time PM. Otherwise as soon as he leaves things will go backwards and he will watch all his work go down the drain.

That's kinda where I am, although my community isn't circling the drain.

But you know, I'm not the only person who lives here, and if others don't care enough about it then so be it. One of the best things getting older has taught me is the limits of my ability to control the outcome of things and that the world won't fall apart if I'm not on the job. It'll be different but that's OK (and even if it's not OK, it's still OK).

Have you considered starting your own property mgmt company?

BillD

If this is true then your decision is easy. You step down when you are ready to accept that things will not be maintained at the level you want going forward. When this happens you either move or accept it.

MichaelT21,
If you asked your homeowners have as many questions as you ask this site, you should have all the answers already.

As Max has mentioned your HOA needs more help and the only way that happens is if dues are raised and the community realizes the crisis, they have in front of them. What is that famous saying "You have to hit Rock bottom before your figure it out"

Demand more hours from your PMC and get the help that is needed to do the jobs. The HOA will be upset with the increase but what recourse do they have? Move or pay the dues or go into collections. Most will pay the dues.

Why is it you think that owners get to decide what the budget is?

Have you even asked the other directors if they will approve paying a manager (who will do a lot more than the current very part-time manager does)?

I agree with these comments:

Stuff broke. Our developer gave us some stuff in our community that is unique and there are not a lot of folks out there that service the stuff that our developer used in building our community spaces, it's a royal pain trying to find vendors to fix it.

It's not an association property manager that we need. It's a part time skilled maintenance technician. I've looked but don't think we'd have much luck hiring such a person as that type of person is in high demand.

I was on a HOA board with 1500+ houses and the HOA having responsibility for the irrigation and landscaping of all front yards, including maintaining about 75 industrial-size backflow preventers that failed often. I can imagine all the challenges of coordinating the maintenance of the wells. I would not call his work doing so "micro-managing." I'd call it a necessity at present.

From the sounds of it, if MichaelT21 resigns from the board, the HOA common areas will return to a state of poor maintenance. If he gets back on the board, then there will be a lot of work to shape it up.

I think the better choice is to first attempt to convince the board of the need to contract for a qualified manager.

I bet this is at least the fourth thread where MichaelT21 has raised quitting. Meanwhile, I think the decision-tree is clear here. That he won't lay out the decision-tree and then follow it is curious. So tired he can't think straight? So conflicted he can't think straight? So sick of pushback he cannot even imagine looking for a manager; get the cost of a manager; put it into a budget; and propose it? So in need of pats on the back that he cannot bring himself to be seen as a new and different kind of director-President?

Or many, including myself, need to learn the hard way that not all can be fixed (in the vein of CathyA3's posts), and this has to be okay, or one will self-destruct/burn-out/yada trying to fix the un-fixable.

I still remember his having some $1000+ or so personal property stolen. He'd donated its use to the HOA on certain evenings. While some would call his act kindness, I would call it excessive, manners-wise and director-wise.

I'm glad you get it.

I am currently in work of trying to figure out the cost of retiring one set of mechanical components. It looks like it'd cost $20,000 but then would get us a guaranteed, professionally maintained, no headache source of water. I'm going to pitch this to the Board and see where it goes. I can't keep maintaining the stuff.

By the way, thanks for the reminder about the stolen personal property. Turns out that I got it back the next day. It wasn't stolen, but someone put it in their garage for safekeeping and I was able to find the person who was storing it and returned it to me.

I'm completely serious about Michael starting his own PMC. If you think about it, he gets dinged for a lot of stuff (obsessiveness, micromanagement, asking for advice with no intent of taking it, etc) that's considered a liability in a volunteer HOA President. But these things would be assets for the owner of a small PMC.

Just sayin'.

BillD