Professional Lake & Pond Mgt. for HOA

I was kicking the tires on my upcoming 2010 proposed budget and stopped at the line item where we pay a lake and pond management company to keep watch over our community pond, which has 1/2 mile circumference.

Every month, we could an "audit" of how many wildlife (ducks, geese, turtles, fish) are visibly spotted as well as the appearance of the lake water itself but I don't really see any other services provided other than visual inspections.

Does any other HOA folks on this forum have a lake or pond they must manage and do you pay a company to inspect it once per month?

With the economy and our need to continually renew and refresh existing amenities (I've posted about this earlier), I don't wanna spend $2,640 for spot inspections that seem fairly intuitive to an Average Joe. Or is professional lake management truly worth it? I think we pay extra if a problem every truly arose and different services were rendered.

Bonnie,

That's the question I'm asking my board right now. Our pond contract is a monthly audit (or once every two months) with no maintenance of our fountains (we have two). It sounds like your current contract is more useful.

I think the contract status is maintained out of habit (that is, we renew it without any question) BUT there may be a very good reason I've not thought of for keeping it. The lake management precedes my board tenure so I've posed a friendly debate question, by email, to the board-at-large. The contract is worth over $2,500 but I'm not sure visual inspections are cutting it for that price tag. Other than a chemical analysis, the other portions of the reports are intuitive to anyone who isn't a pro lake manager.

Of course, the company will disagree, so I seek third-party opinion and input.

Some board members want to "zero-base" next year's budget, effectively breaking it down and rebuilding it line-by-line. It involves questioning all expense items over making simple inflationary adjustments to the previous year's expenses. We're small and all volunteer so it's been reasonable to budget in this manner. Our budget is so simple, rebuilding it brick-by-brick will be easy.

It's judgement calls on things like "Pond management" that are the tougher decisions.

I agree with Steve. Don't see the point of the animal count.

We have 4 ponds and are in the first year of a 2 year rehab - clearing ours of invasive weeds and algae which makes sense from an aesthetic and pond health POV. We have one fountain we remove and replace by ourselves.