Potential revisions to our neighborhood covenants.

The WSPOA attorney has taken the suggestions of the Woodland Shores Covenants Committee and put them into legal verbage for our review and discussion. The proposed revisions were revealed at the WSPOA board meeting yesterday and a great discussion ensued.

WSPOA President Mike Bevens read each revised paragraph aloud, and asked for input from all property owners in attendance. Overall, everyone seemed pleased with the proposed revisions, with the exception of part of paragraph 6 which discusses a schedule of automatic dues increases. The revision of that paragraph specified a dues increase of 5% every 5 years (rounded to the nearest $5.00). That schedule was thought to be a bit messy, mathematically, so the suggestion was made that it be changed to $5.00 every five years (effectively raising dues $1 per year, which is much less than the rate of inflation).

The reason for writing scheduled dues increases into the covenants is to prevent the hassle and expense of having to bring the property owners to a vote every time the community needs a dues adjustment to help pay for community-related expenses. An occasional community vote seems like it would be a relatively easy task, but a vote isn’t all that’s involved. When it comes to legal changes in the covenants — which is where the dues are specified — there is much abstract/title work, legal expense, and volunteer effort expended for even the smallest changes. Slight scheduled increases make better financial sense in the long run.

Head on over to the Covenants and Restrictions page of this website to download a .pdf of the proposed revisions, read previous updates, and see copies of the original (but very outdated) covenants. Feel free to come back to this post to leave comments if you have any questions or observations that you’d like to add to the discussion.

The process of updating our covenants is a community-wide task, open to all property owners. Please do make an informed decision by reading all about the proposed revisions before it’s time to put them to community vote.