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OPINIONS & CONCERNS

Send yours to [email protected]

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MESSAGE FROM SUMMIT COUNTY COMMISSIONER DAVE URE TO LUCY ARCHER.  September 2008
“One of my favorite quotations is… “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”–Thomas Jefferson.  The value of the work and information you are providing to your community through your involvement in your HOA and with your website is immeasurable. More folks need to have their hand on the pulse of government. Without public oversight the politicians get away with imposing their will and favoring their own agendas. The reason for having Articles and Bylaws is very important. They keep you from getting sued. Bylaws will mean everyone gets treated the same. When you turn someone down for a request to do something, you can reference the Bylaws and have a legal reason for doing so. The state and county needs a recorded copy to prove you are a legal organization doing business for a group of people. Good luck in trying to get your neighbors involved in upholding your community’s filed and recorded Articles and Bylaws. Thanks for your time, Dave Ure
David Ure served for 14 years on the Utah House Legislature and as House Majority Leader, seven years as the Chair of the House Rules Review Committee.  Ure now serves on the Summit County Council as a County Commissioner.

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September 25, 2014 –

“Thank you very much for the time you spend forcing transparency on this [underdrains] issue , Lucy. I’m glad you’re contacting all the homeowners.
I may be out of town on Oct. 14 but will do my best to attend the meeting and vote.
From Lisa Kirchenheiter”

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So What Is Wrong with the Homeowner Association Model?
The wrong developer can doom the community to failure before control is ever transitioned to a resident elected board. Unfortunately many first time homebuyers never receive or read the governing documents.
Unknowingly, they break the rules and run afoul of the association. And there will always be some residents who knowingly violate the covenants, break the rules and challenge the board. In today’s electronic age, email and social networking can stir up dissension in a community in a flash. At a minimum, most residents do not participate in the association and would not consider
serving on a committee or the board.
Many annual membership meetings fail to reach the necessary quorum in order to conduct business! The volunteers that serve on a board may lack the time and/or the expertise to properly govern the association. Board members are neighbors and sensitive to making tough decisions that are unpopular. It’s easier to pass the problems on to the next board. For these reasons and more, the HOA for a stand-alone, single family home, is a ran away tragedy for the Homeowner residents.

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from:		*******@aol.com
to:		[email protected]
date:		Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 9:36 AM
subject:		Re: Silver Springs Rocks! Thank You! Thank You!!

“Lucy you are an AMAZING human being…I am eternally grateful ”

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“December 12, 2014,

Dear Lucy, God Bless you for advocating for our neighbor. We never received the first email, and were horrified when we read the second. … Please let us know if she gets enough, we can help again in the New Year.
Signed, Diane  & Chris”

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“Happy New year Lucy to your family and you…. You are a very impressive and thoughtful lady….stay with it!  Janet Lieberman”

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 2015 January 2nd letter quote:  “It was disappointing to read the attorney Quinn Sperry letter saying that Rick Hovey and the Board would not negotiate the 18% interest and attorney fees from the hardship experienced by one of our neighbors suffering the indignities of a HOA lien against their property.
It seems to us that Hovey and the Board have used Association money to repair a trustee’s driveway, and to make repairs on the Noland’s, and other neighbors underdrain subsurface water issues, both are personal property responsibilities of private owners.  Yet the Board would not negotiate or assist an Association member who the Board had added to their financial hardship….  Your claim that trustees use their positions for personal agendas and crony benefits has merit we had not entirely agreed with until now….  
We share your vision that a neighborhood can be an extension of family.  We will support you and other neighbors who hold this ideal.
Best Wishes from your East Meadows Drive Neighbors”

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Community Messenger:  “We are neighbors to the north with a home and property near the area where your underdrain committee has been releasing your subdivision’s amassed groundwater during recent years.  Does it ever occur to anyone in Silver Springs that this practice is inconsiderate to those of us who have our own natural water flow issues to deal with?  Just let nature absorb as much water through natural processes. Most west Summit County flatland has the same concerns as you do, so what makes you think you are permitted to send your flow into our properties? We heard residents of Silver Springs are disputing their board.  Kick the bums out.

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Community Messenger:  “I live in Ranch Place, I am your neighbor.  We have the same and more active water issues being that we are downhill from your subdivision.  Our board has not allowed individual homeowners to push their personal agendas onto the rest of us.  Look at our association documents, one paragraph says it all, there is flowing water, each owner is responsible to handle it on their own property without altering the flow.  Are you serious about what your so called underdrain guy is doing to your neighborhood?  Put a stop to it before you regret the outcome.  It is your property and your neighborhood, stop getting pushed around.”

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The SSSFHOA does NOT OWN any land.
The SSSFHOA does NOT OWN any amenities.
The SSSFHOA does NOT OWN the underdrains.
On what does the SSSFHOA use the $70,500 they collect each year from the Homeowners?
$32,900 annually goes to the Master Association for land, lakes and parks.
$32,600 annually remains in our budget, 5% goes to the management company.
So why is there so much language, Articles, and subsections for Assessments, Special Assessments, fines and CAPITAL IMPROVEMENTS in the baneful draft CCRs???
You can be sure, Nothing good !

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Draft CCRs make the underdrains the focus of our neighborhood and lives. Our current charter documents do not mention them at all. See underdrains inclusion on these draft pages: 1.9 Common Expenses; 1.23 Underdrain system; 4.2 Owner Responsibility; 7.1 Rights and Responsibilities; Article 8 Budgets & Assessments; 8.1 Purpose of Assessments; 8.10 Special Assessments; 8.11 Special Assessments to Individual Lots; 9.6 Foreclose Sale of Owners lot and home; 10.1 General Easements to Lots; 11.11 Unsightly Items and Conditions; 11.21 Landscape Restrictions; 12.2 Property Insurance; 12.3 Comprehensive General Liability Insurance; 12.8 Association’s Right to Negotiate All Claims and Losses and Receive Proceeds; Article 13 Eminent Domain; Article 14 TERMINATION OF THE PROJECT by approval from 90% of Owners; Article 19 Reserves for Underdrains; Subsection C. 51% vote by Owners can veto the underdrains reserve fund line item. A good place to begin the demise of this pesky dispute.
Morris & Sperry draft CCRs can be viewed at: https://www.silverspringscommunity.com/
Very bottom of this Homepage.

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OPEN YOUR WALLET, THE HOA ARC may hire professionals at your expense. They will charge you from $1,000 to $10,000 for a “Performance Fee” to get into your personal business. ARC Standards and Draft CCRs Article 5 (c): the ARC may hire an architect, engineer or other professionals to assist in the HOA ARC work to review and approve your plans  after your architect, your contractor builder, Summit County Planning, and the professionals you already engaged, have approved them. When these volunteers get around to reviewing your plans their delays may run for weeks, or in some known cases, many months. These ARC members are annually rotating volunteer neighbors, a few may have been elected (only by a dozen or so votes), who most likely have no expertise or experience with building plans. WHO NEEDS THIS INTERFERENCE?!?!? Dissolving the HOA will end this interference, save you time and money, get you on your way with your building permit after Summit County approval.

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F.Y.I. Message: “I thought about why these men want to destroy our neighborhood? I figure they want the underdrains to be accepted by the Homeowners to cover up the under the table expenditures and work they chose to do without following the rules. They also want the underdrains to be determined as common areas to ensure the continuation of the HOA. There are Homeowners who prefer the HOA be disbanded mostly because of years of the Board being dysfunctional. CCR’s are put in place to control how a neighborhood would look. Once built out an HOA is no longer required, now our subdivision has been completely built out the HOA is a problem. [This homeowner said he] heard the trustees say their CCRs attorney walked out on them; he feels those trustees seem to be against the law and the Homeowners.”

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March 6, 2018 ·
HOA’S AS OVERREACHING MONSTERS? A NEW TREND FOR HOME BUYERS?
HOAs proliferated in the 1970s to 1990s. But lately, the more independent, pluralistic buyer is increasingly rejecting the HOA model as too intrusive, subjective and “Big Brother” like. The law profession has jumped in to make HOAs even more restrictive by their proliferation of state legislation that supports the board, making the Homeowners the targets of assessments, fines, and foreclosures.
HOA proponents, developers, property managers, attorneys, management companies, are concerned about the public turning away from HOAs, the marketing ploy is to name them “common interest communities.” This new name is not slowing down the defection of homeowners from HOAs.
It has become obvious that long-standing types of governing neighborhoods and subdivisions are far more reliable defaults organized as villages, cities or towns.
https://www.linkedin.com/…/hoas-overreaching-monsters-new-…/

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Silver Springs SF community does not have a single common area amenity. All amenity and undeveloped parcels belong to the Master Association. The Expenditures and Budget for SSSFHOA should be cured each year by the $175 per lot annual dues to the Master Association. Bookkeeping, enforcements, attorneys, a manager should not surpass the annual dues collected from the Homeowners.
Have you read the draft CCRs Declarations? There are proposed thousands of dollars in Assessments, Special Assessments, Capital Improvements, and Common Expenses, and probably others, that will skyrocket Homeowners HOA indebtedness. This HOA Board, and the draft CCRS have lost any sense of reality. They have secreted themselves away from the Homeowners by the use of “Tickets” to communicate. Except the trustees don’t reply to them, the ‘Tickets” are closed as soon as they are delivered, never to be seen again.
Only one trustee, Hunt Williams, will make his phone number and email address available to the Homeowners. The board does business by phone and email, even vote on resolutions and motions. None of this is recorded or included in the Minutes of the 60 day separation board assembly. All outside of the realm of Homeowner view, access and reason.
You can find the full text of the draft CCRs on the Silver Springs Community website Homepage. Linked from the bottom of this page. https://www.silverspringscommunity.com/ See at bottom of this Home page.

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Community Messenger: Neighbors have been cautioning neighbors for a number of years about the Trustees ability to ruin our neighborhood with their activities of wasteful and pointless work to unearth the 40 year abandoned under drains. This Machiavellian pursuit that only appears to have value is now poised to make a gargantuan financial leap via a specious draft CCRs Declaration that will cost all the homeowners their privacy, their property rights, cloud their values and connive huge assessments that will never balance the damages and costs to our homes and neighborhoods.
Read the Morris & Sperry Draft CCRs and prove it to yourself that it is imperative to VOTE NO! on the draft CCRs.

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During this last week an Estate Sale at Lot 54 brought a number of SSSF neighbors into conversation. One remarked “Don’t give me any more bad news.” We discussed that sometimes what appears to be BAD NEWS is actually GOOD NEWS. This is true when the news foretells a problem that is solvable with attention, thereby curtailing harm; bringing resolution before there are irreversible damages. That is good news because paying attention together we can overcome truly bad news.

Truly bad news is bulldozers tearing out your trees, bringing death to your landscape, stigmatizing our subdivision. Ignoring, therefore allowing, enormous assessments and over-reach of our private property rights will take much more effort to re-establish property values; and pay-off unnecessary and painful reconstruction costs.

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This SSSFHOA attorney unintentionally explains why so many single family home subdivisions are DISSOLVING THEIR HOA:

In Curtis G. Kimble’s paper titled “Operating Under the Radar but Above Board” he describes how “common interest communities” (HOAs) true nature has DETERIORATED (augmented by attorneys exploiting the legal system) into an oligarchical structure, a concept which is very foreign to most American homeowners.

When discussing this with another HOA attorney his assessment is that the amendments and statutes that are increasingly being recorded at the expense of the homeowners private property rights, disenfranchising control from the many to the very few, is having the growing effect of HOA dissolution. Subdivisions like ours that are stand-alone single family homes without any common area and no amenities truly have no need for oligarchical marionettes brow-beating and creating ever more burdensome layers of rules and assessments over our lives.

Kimble continues: “Always be sensitive to the fact that perhaps the rudest awakening for homeowners in common interest communities (HOAs) is the rather limited role that association members now have over their private property under new state laws and the association’s governing documents. Although board members are elected to office (in our HOA usually by fewer than a dozen votes) by the members of the association, the structure of corporate governance is essentially a “top down,” oligarchical structure, a concept which is very foreign to a lot of homeowners. (Not what we originally signed up for!)

Fortunately, provision is included in our documents for the Dissolution of our HOA by a consensus of the majority of our Homeowners. ARE YOU READY TO RID OUR LIVES FROM OVER-REACHING DOCUMENTS AND A CONFLICTED, GRASPING  BOARD?  Contact me at: [email protected]

https://rkwlaw.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/hoa-quick-read-1-2-letter-size.pdf

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Community Messenger: Take it from a r.e. agent, If you had 2 identical homes located across the street from each other and one had HOA & fees that keep going up and the other had no HOA fees, the one with the lower expenses would sell more quickly and for a higher price. Buyers are getting smart. No one wants to add HOA stress and cost to home ownership.

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Community Messenger: I have heard a trustee or two say that this language is “common” and included in many agreements and other legal documents. This bandwagon statement does not give authority to what we want in our neighborhood. “Because Johnny jumps off the roof, does that mean we have to jump off after him like lemmings?”

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Here is our version of “You Know you’re a redneck if….”
We will recite, “YOU KNOW YOU DON’T WANT OR NEED A HOA IF…… You didn’t know you had an HOA!
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. You can’t name anyone on the Board of Trustees.
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. You can’t think of a single thing the HOA does to make your life better!
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. You have never attended a HOA meeting!
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. there is not one iota of common area property for the HOA to take care of! So what is the $375 a year for?
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. You disagree with the Arch and Compliance Rules you never had a chance to approve and vote on, in fact, you have never seen them therefore never read them, therefore how can you comply?!
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. You were assessed a $250 fine for the two weeds growing next to your mailbox!
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. You know this is America and there is no way you need a very small group of people you don’t know and you didn’t vote for telling you how to landscape your yard or that your kids bikes have to be out of sight or else you will get dinged another $250, You did not know the fees went up! Now you are going to get dinged $1,000!!!
“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. they don’t want to hear from you. Fill in one of their “Tickets” then expect to be ignored and forgotten.

“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if…..when you finally get a chance to vote, you receive a Proxy, not a Ballot, telling you to choose a Trustee to cast your vote for you.

“You Know You Don’t Want or Need a HOA if….. it is not required or mandated by anyone except those people on the Board who just want to boss you around, assess you and spend your money on projects you don’t need. It’s all layers of hooey!!!

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Why You Should Avoid Buying in HOA Neighborhoods
By Kevin Mercadante • 126 Comments
A couple of weeks ago I ran a post, Do You Ever REALLY Own Your Home, in which I challenged the assumption that you actually enjoy true ownership, in the traditional sense. I cited limited property use restrictions, heavy economic use restrictions, the potential for legal attachment, and increasingly burdensome property taxes as factors eroding true homeownership. Today I want to focus a factor that puts even more extreme limits on home ownership – homeowners associations, or HOAs. And more specifically, why you should avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods.

Why You Should Avoid Buying in HOA Neighborhoods

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“Im looking at the survey the HOA pres emailed. Is he trying to pull a fast one? He listed a bunch of the common facilities he wants us to give him an opinion about except these are not in our neighborhood they are part of the Community Master Association that he is not mentioning. The only thing he lists thats in our neighborhood is the underdrains that no one who lives here wants anything to do with. He asks a lot of questions about them except if we want them which we have told him a bunch of times we dont.
If he really wants to know if the board is representing us its not hard to figure out the answer is a big no. The board hides and talks and makes plans that we don’t want. I agree that we don’t need and sure don’t want self-elected people we don’t know and didn’t vote for making rules and telling us we have to do what they say. I can see what the master association is doing, I have no idea what the single family trustees do except spend our money and stir up troubles for the neighbors.”

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“No one is out to hurt any person or to discredit any good they think they are doing in our neighborhood. These posts are hopefully a means of keeping our neighborhood from being damaged and destroyed using the draft CCRs’, particularly the excessive Special Assessments and Capital Improvement assessments, and really, so many other Articles’ provisions. The entire draft CCRs document is mean-spirited, over-reaching and irredeemable.
Our subdivision has no ownership of any common area property to assess for or improve. Our entire subdivision is under the ownership of the individual Homeowners. Parks, ponds, remnant parcels, tennis court, are under the ownership and control of the separate organization, the Master Association.
The two committees we have been discussing this month, having the same chairman, apparently think the Homeowners can be treated like cattle in a shoot, blindly moving along ever narrowing constraints, being forced to face a common deadly fate. We are Not cattle! We will not allow volunteer neighbors we have not elected to treat us like cattle. We are thinking, responsible individuals with property rights. We will not allow anyone to tell us or try to convince us otherwise.”

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Silver Springs Community:  A resident of Park Meadows called me this morning to share information about his neighborhood ground water situation. He told me that Park Meadows has always had consistent and continual water in their crawl spaces and in their basements. The golf course ponds are truly retention ponds. There are no underdrains. When you have the privilege of living in the mountains you have to adjust to the geology without imposing on your neighbors. Homeowners who have high water problems take responsibility for their own property water containment. These few owners usually have sump pumps drawing water out of their basements/crawlspaces out through tubes/conduits that draw the water out to the curbs along the street. These curbs then send the water to the nearest storm drain grate, away from the homes. He told me if you drive around Park Meadows you will see white PVC, or black polystyrene tubes indicating they are being engaged for removal of any type of water accumulation.
He has heard about the dispute between the SSSF Homeowners and a couple entrenched volunteers on our board. He can’t understand why the Homeowners majority is being left out of the equation; he asked where is fiduciary duty and transparency in our HOA? We really appreciate his comments, though he is “Singing to the choir”, it is very helpful to learn about our neighbors water situation closer to the mountains.”

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Silver Springs Community:  “The “Park Meadows” comment is similar to what I was told by the U.S. Geologic Survey’s water engineer. He showed me maps and their website. He told me there used to be 102 or 120 wells in the vicinity of Canyons, Old Ranch Road area, and the Silver Springs Community. All but one of these wells has dried up except in Treasure Mountain Estates on the west side of Osguthorpe’s acreage. The well at the Cove failed after two years of drilling, the SunPeak well also failed, the Atkinson well dried up, etc. The Bear Hollow Dr. well capacity has decreased because of the more than a decade of drought, increased building competing for water (Fairway Village, Waldorf Astoria, Jupiter Landing, and Canyons Village, to name a few. ) Drilling higher up the foothills is uncertain, costly and difficult for a variety of reasons.
This engineer showed me maps with “scalloped” waves of underground water flow depicted along the bases of all the mountain foothills. He showed how the flow was more voluminous closer to the mountains and diminishes as it moves downhill (in our Basin is downhill on the east and north).
Since the mid-1950’s water resources have been a much discussed topic among the nine or so water agencies in our area. The supply of water is limited yet the demand for building permits continues to grow.
One day, sooner than we may realize, water restrictions could become more prohibitive and controlled.
SSSF’s board’s support of furtive actions to discharge all our underground water for the benefit of a handful of lots will catch up to us, creating damaging stress on our mature trees and landscaping. Roto-rooting tree roots that are searching deeper and deeper for sustenance is a betrayal of nature. The specious draft CCRs are mean-spirited, punitive, ill-conceived, centered on demands for assessments, Special Assessments, and Capital improvements assessments for replacing and expanding a temporary system built in 1979 to assist in the construction of our infrastructure (lines for gas, electricity, culinary water, etc.). Forty years later, someone comes up with counting manhole covers and measuring water discharge as a reason to destroy everyone’s yards and property. Vote NO on the board’s draft CCRs.”

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Silver Springs Community “Silver Springs Single Family is all privately owned land. There are no amenities or common areas. The SS Master Association owns and is responsible for the ponds, parks, tennis court, and misc. undeveloped small parcels. There are no areas in SSSF that require assessments for improvements or demolition, etc. Allowing one man’s crusade for extensive upheaval of many, maybe over 50%, of our private property, is a foolish boondoggle!
“BOONDOGGLE” is work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value. It is a waste of money or time on unnecessary or questionable projects… viz. BOONDOGGLE UNDERDRAINS!””

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NEGATIVE EFFECTS of discharging/flushing out large quantities of valuable groundwater via the SSSF underdrains.
1986 -U.S.G.S. Technical Publication No. 85 “Water Resources of the Park City Area, Utah With Emphasis on Ground Water” by Walter F. Holmes, Kendall R. Thompson, and Michael Enright. 70 pages.
–“Potential Effects of Increased Withdrawal of Ground Water From Consolidated Rocks” (such as the discharge of large volumes of water via the SSSF underdrain system) are decreases in the discharge (decrease) of water of local springs and streams, water-level declines in wells (2016 SS well on west peninsula of the large lake is now 500? deep and nearly dry), and downward movement of poor quality water displaces refresh of clean aquifer water.”
–“THERE ARE TWO 8-10 INCH OUTLET PIPES BEHIND THE WILSON’S HOUSE (on Lot 105) THAT FLOW ALMOST FULL ALL YEAR LONG INTO WILLOW CREEK – 300-400 ACRE FEET/YEAR.” (Matt Lindon)
One acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land, about the size of a football field, one foot deep. An average household uses between one-half and one acre-foot of water per year for indoor and outdoor use. An average household uses between one-half and one acre-foot of water per year for indoor and outdoor use. In one year the underdrains waste enough water for each family in Silver Springs for two years.  This issue is a hornet’s nest waiting to explode.  Dissolve the SSSFHOA before it does.

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Comment: Community Messenger: Think about it, one of the most important perks of living in a stand alone single family home is that you will not have an HOA and its board to deal with. Not dissolving a single family home HOA after the developer leaves is an expensive mistake. Don’t need it. Don’t want it. Dissolve it.

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RECITALS BIAS THE INTENT AND TONE OF NEW CCRs.
Since the BOT is selling the idea that Silver Springs must update the CCRs, it follows that “updated” documents does not mean incorporating into them old agreements between another HOA belonging to the Developers of Silver Springs East and Summit County many years before our HOA was organized. Secondly, the Summit County Attorney has written to the BOT and the Homeowners that “THE OWNERSHIP AND MAINTENANCE OF THE UNDERDRAINS IS A PRIVATE MATTER BETWEEN THE LAND OWNERS AND THE OWNERS ASSOCIATION.” Summit County’s position is that there is no mandate for the SS Single Family Homeowners to take on this dangerous, aged and precarious liability. Further, the HOA does NOT OWN the underdrains. In fact, the County Commissioners, during a public Commission Meeting, advised our HOA BOT not to take the underdrains under its auspices as they are a dangerous legal entanglement that no one will end unscathed.

Single Family Meeting Minutes indicate that the motivation to re-write the SSSF CCRs originates from a underdrain proponent who has been pushing this conflict since 2006, seeking ” to convince various Board Members to disenfranchise the 1985, 1994, 2008, 2014 votes of the SSSF Homeowners to “Ignore the Underdrains.”

2008 SSSFHOA  Articles of  Incorporation: Article III Corporate Purpose:
“This Non-Profit Corporation opposes and rejects any involvement or pursuit by any special interest group or person(s) who shall attempt to use the Board and/or Association to empower their cause or agenda; or who proposes to create responsibility or liability to and for this corporation for any previous, pending or future construction, installation, system, or structure.”

There is one person pushing the underdrains despite Homeowner persistence since first incorporating in 1985, and voting again in 1994, then revising the SSSF Articles in 2008 by an 81% Homeowner vote to not entangle our neighborhood in the underdrain project, and again a majority vote in 2014 to Ignore the Underdrains.

With all these clearly voted persistent directives from the Homeowners, the few proponents persist in their furtive activities maneuvering the new board trustees and using Association money.  In draft CCR ARTICLE 4.2 the re-write committee chair (who is also the underdrain committee chair) proposed to give itself the power to force the Association to become responsible for the maintenance, repair and replacement of the underdrain system, a series of tubes THEY/WE, HAVE NEVER, AND STILL DO NOT OWN. This draft section is contrary to the Articles of Incorporation and attempts to give authority to assess to the INDIVIDUAL HOMEOWNERS the enormous costs of this imprudent project.

The entire draft Single Family Home CCRs are an egregious over-reach into private property ownership, circumvents fiduciary duty and stewardship under the guise of “adding value”.  This is unprovable hype. There is a movement in Utah and the U.S. to dissolve HOAs, to peel back this layer of oppressive heavy-handedness from built-out, stand alone, single family homes in neighborhoods.  SSSF is far better served as an autonomous subdivision, locally protected by Summit County regulations, and services and Utah laws.

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We had an extended conversation today with another Park Meadows long-time resident. They also have many problems with their HOA. Or should we say HOAs. This man has been on the board and agrees there is no resolution for lack of honesty by the board members. He and his fellow homeowners are in the process of divesting their master association of their reserves assets as one of the last steps to dissolve that MA entirely. More and more single family homeowners are waking up to “the fact that HOAs are the devils playground.”
He told us more information about how Park Meadows’ several Phases are all part of a large swamp. Living at the foot of the mountains has a way of creating high groundwater. [a watershed is the area or line that delineates neighboring drainage basins and high groundwater, at the foothills of the mountains]. His owner neighbors are all responsible for their own properties, “it is the responsible, adult thing to do.”

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The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) struck an extraordinary law for criminal justice reform on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019, placing real limitations on POLICING FOR PROFIT across the country. This new Supreme Court law appears to extend to attorneys and HOA CCR documents drafted to insidiously place attorneys or a HOA board in the position of trustee for an entire subdivision’s properties, having the power of sale. Our current SSSF HOA documents Article 9 includes severe fines, liens, and foreclosures on Homeowner’s properties for relatively innocuous infractions of HOA rules, most of which are unratified by the Owners.

Example of SSSF HOA attorney Draft CCR: ” Article and section 9.6 Foreclosure Sale.  Pursuant to Utah Law and established policies duly adopted by the Board, the Association shall have all rights of foreclosure granted by the Act, both judicially and non-judicially…. An Owner’s acceptance of an interest in a Lot constitutes a simultaneous conveyance of the Lots in trust, with power of sale, to the Association’s attorney Quinn Sperry, as trustee, for the benefit of the Association, for the purpose of securing payment of Assessments under the terms of this Declaration.”

The national outcry from Homeowners forced to live in HOAs with policing for profit rules demonstrates that civil asset forfeiture unjustly impinges upon American citizen’s constitutional private property rights.
Our new 2019 Home Owners CCR Draft removes Article 9.6 Foreclosure from our governing documents.

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