In August, I wrote an open letter warning that the Foothills Community Association HOA was in trouble.
Now I am pleased to announce that the team of concerned homeowners with whom I am working is ready to launch its campaign to reform the FCA.
We will hold an open meeting in the Multipurpose Room at the Pecos Community Center, 17010 S. 48th Street, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17.
We will discuss our five-point reform package, and we will begin our drive to collect signatures on a petition that will compel the Board to put our reforms up for an open vote.
I will describe these reforms briefly below, and much more information about them and other issues are on our website: https://www.thefoothillsinfo.com.
There are many serious issues facing the FCA, and we will need a serious Board to deal with them. I have addressed some previously, such as its procurement policy. Here are a few other examples:
Properly addressing the 14th Way and Dry Creek Road problem could be quite expensive, but it needs to be done.
Some homeowners are having problems with exterior walls. The FCA cannot simply tell them that they must pay the entire cost of repairs.
The landscaping has deteriorated in many areas and needs to be restored.
The Foothills Golf Club is in financial trouble, as evidenced by its overdue property taxes. The board already is not enforcing the existing agreement for management of lakes. We have no idea how much this may be costing the FCA. And there has been no discussion of how the Board would cope if the Golf Club suffers that same fate as the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course.
There are serious problems with numerous electrical hazards on the FCA property. At the July meeting, the board president repeatedly tried to cut off a homeowner who was describing the various electrical safety hazards in a presentation. The president was shouted down by the interested audience several times so the homeowner could finish.
We have developed a package of five reforms to the FCA’s bylaws which will address key immediate problems and lay the groundwork for addressing these looming problems:
Implementing a procurement policy that conforms to industry best practices standards
Implementing an election policy that ensures free and fair elections
Implementing electronic voting
Updating the FCA’s very outdated Bylaws
Establishing term limits
Over the past several months, we have seen the effect of homeowner pressure. First, we compelled the Board to reverse its position on the requirements for bylaws amendments, thus making our reform package viable.
We have now pushed the Board into producing a procurement policy (which falls short of what is needed, but it is at least a start), exploring electronic voting, and agreeing to have a vote on term limits.
This leaves only two items on our reform package about which the Board has not taken some position: a proper election policy and updating the Bylaws. These both should be non-controversial.
We are pushing forward with our reform package so that these reforms will be memorialized in the bylaws (so there can be no backtracking) and so that they will be in place for the April 2020 election.
We invite all FCA members to our public meeting on October 17. This includes both homeowner and corporate members. Working together, we can take these first crucial steps to fix our HOA.
David Randolph
Reprinted from the October 9 edition of the Ahwatukee Foothills News