LanceG2 (Georgia)
Posts: 3
Posts: 3
Posted:
I'm a HOA president in the metro Atlanta area (Goergia).
Our board was recently discussing how we want to approach warnings vs fines for violations. We are trying to strike a balance between attempting to not be a nit picky HOA, but enforcing the larger things. For example, our documents are written in a way to allow us to enforce that lawns are mowed, but don't force us in to requiring that everybody have a weed free yard so we only enforce that people keep their yards mowed and not have large bare spots. We have a management company that does a couple of drive throughs a year and it took a lot of back and forth and training with them to use a more lenient, but consistent set of standards.
We do not have an overly active community (we had trouble filling all of the board seats this year) and our community does not have amenities like a pool etc.. During the last set of drive throughs we had a lot of houses that received one notice about something small, like needing to pressure wash their driveway. Then we have a small group of houses with multiple violations that are problem houses. As a board we decided to not give these a lot of scrutiny because these were friendly reminders, not notices to fine. In discussing what to do with houses that don't comply the general consensus among the board is that if a house has multiple violations we want to target them for fines if they don't address things. But if a house gets a notice for something small like a driveway that needs pressure washing, doesn't address it, but otherwise has a well maintained property without any issues we don't want to fine these.
That is where the point system came up as an idea where we assign points to violations based on the severity and only move to fines if a house has a total that exceeds that threshold after being given time to rectify it. We haven't run this by our attorney yet, but our documents do not have any limitations that would prevent us from doing this. Has anybody heard of and HOA doing this and is anybody aware of case law etc. which could create an issue for us with this?
Our board was recently discussing how we want to approach warnings vs fines for violations. We are trying to strike a balance between attempting to not be a nit picky HOA, but enforcing the larger things. For example, our documents are written in a way to allow us to enforce that lawns are mowed, but don't force us in to requiring that everybody have a weed free yard so we only enforce that people keep their yards mowed and not have large bare spots. We have a management company that does a couple of drive throughs a year and it took a lot of back and forth and training with them to use a more lenient, but consistent set of standards.
We do not have an overly active community (we had trouble filling all of the board seats this year) and our community does not have amenities like a pool etc.. During the last set of drive throughs we had a lot of houses that received one notice about something small, like needing to pressure wash their driveway. Then we have a small group of houses with multiple violations that are problem houses. As a board we decided to not give these a lot of scrutiny because these were friendly reminders, not notices to fine. In discussing what to do with houses that don't comply the general consensus among the board is that if a house has multiple violations we want to target them for fines if they don't address things. But if a house gets a notice for something small like a driveway that needs pressure washing, doesn't address it, but otherwise has a well maintained property without any issues we don't want to fine these.
That is where the point system came up as an idea where we assign points to violations based on the severity and only move to fines if a house has a total that exceeds that threshold after being given time to rectify it. We haven't run this by our attorney yet, but our documents do not have any limitations that would prevent us from doing this. Has anybody heard of and HOA doing this and is anybody aware of case law etc. which could create an issue for us with this?