[stomachmonkey]

I’m on the fence with our HOA, while they do some of the typical BS crap like sending letters about trash bins left out too long and street parking for the most part it’s pretty good.

Our community started 15 years ago and is still building. The place looks great and even the original areas do not show their age.

A strong HOA certainly does preserve property values and for that I give them credit.

Since we are still building the HOA is still controlled by the developer with residents as advisors but the developers management company really calls the shots. Control wont fully convey to residents until building stops which is still a couple of years away.

We are in what is known as an Unincorporated area. Means we pay property taxes to the county but the county has very little power over the community. Even though we are 4,000+ homes we are considered “rural”. I can set up a spoon range in my 1/3 acre backyard and as long as my background is clear I’m legal. We have no police, county Sheriff covers us but none of our road signs are technically enforceable by any other law enforcement agency. I can run every stop sign and drive 2x’s the posted limit and none of the neighboring towns popos can do **** about it.

Texas local government is a bit weird, we have all sorts of small taxing units that deal with various things, municiples are handled by Fresh Water districts, EMS either directly by individual towns which towns without a FD can contract with directly or through the counties EMS taxing division which is funded by property taxes.

If your development goes the county property tax route it’s $0.10 per $100.00 of assessed value. Which I have a problem with, they say it’s so larger homes pay more which I call BS on as I don’t really see how a larger home costs more to service but OK. The other problem is there are homes assessed a higher value than larger homes in other subdivisions or even on the same block. Charging $0.xx per sq ft seems to make more sense if in fact a larger home costs more to service and would be fair to all.

So to get to the point of the drama.

Rather than pay the $0.10 per $100 our developer made a deal with the town next door for services at $0.06 per $100. Cool.

But then the developer did this weird thing.

The billing period for services runs from Oct-Oct but residents are billed in June, 8 months after the end of the service cycle. So for example, service from 10/17-10/18 gets billed to residents 6/19 with a 7/19 due date.

The developer has been covering the float the whole time and this has been going on for 10 years now.

Developer/HOA was advised that given how large we’ve grown this is no longer sustainable so this October they decided that over the next year they would get billing more closely aligned.

Historical
10/15-10/16 billed 6/17
10/16-10/17 billed 6/18
10/17-10/18 billed 6/19

Catchup plan

10/18-10/19 billed 12/19
10/19-10/20 billed 10/20
10/20-10/21 billed 10/21

We will effectively pay 3 times in a 16 month period for 3 years of service

Now I get it, it should not have come to this and it needs to be fixed.

The problem here is they decided this in October and did not say a word, they just sent a bill that started showing up last week.

Naturally people took to the community page to ask WTF? We paid this.

Apparently there was a letter that was supposed to accompany the bill but conveniently they “forgot to include it”

You can imagine the **** show when an additional bill, payable in January, showed up at Christmas with no warning.

To make it worse, due to the gap in service and when people got billed anyone who sold a house between 8/18 and 6/19 never paid for the years service and the buyers were all asked to pay the bill on signing so they paid for a years worth service on a home they didn’t own.

So far the HOA refuses to allow extensions for this unexpected bill and has told buyers who paid the previous owners bill tough luck, you should have negotiated that.

Well you’d kinda have to know the money was owed right. Title company wont pick it up because its not a bill yet.

Also the bills do not have a line item for the period of coverage. This latest one only says 2020 EMS which since its 2019 you would think is for the coming year.

It’s a cluster.