Meeting Minutes for the Seventh RHHA Homeowner’s Meeting
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010, 7pm
Where: Home of Ken and Carolyn Polglase
Meeting Agenda:
-To continue on with the work in progress, much of the same.
-To report on progress and findings in both the covenant/bylaw committee and the pier committee.
-RHHA officers to discuss process in application for non-profit/tax exempt status
-To discuss future action within committees.
-To set date and agenda for next meeting.
Specific Tasks assigned between now and next meeting:
1- Don D- finish up wih the sign correction and installation
2- Joe Z/John L/Don D- County out to look at pier & get some estimates/apply for permit
3- Jackie P/John L/Don D- Finalize draft of bylaws and covenants
4- Jo F – create final drafts of pier drawings with existing and proposed w/ dimensions
5- Carrie Z – check on Tax Exempt possibilities
In Attendance:
Jan Kawalke
Joann Fyanes
Joe Zambrana
Carrie Zambrana
Ray Pearl
Rita Dunbar
Don Dunbar
Carolyn Polglase
Ken Polglase
Greg Whitesell
Don D: We’d like to thank Ken and Carolyn for hosting tonight and Jan and Jo for hosting the xmas party.
Any additions or deletions to the minutes? Motion to Accept. Minutes are approved
Tres Report: I didn’t get most recent bank state bc it hasn’t arrived
expensditures: 99.64 for signs
Balance 2409.51
I also got paperwork for Safe Deposit box….now we can get the finalized.
Don- If you want we can knock that out
Carrie: I just need you to fill it out and sign it and I can take it to the bank.
Price is 3×5 box is increasing in FEb…but current is $35 for the year,
Don- Well keep things like the deed to the waterfront prop in there. I’ll hang on it to it for while until we get certain business done. I have it right here.
Carrie – then we will have the insurance policy that we can keep in there along with all the paer work for the filing with the county for the HOA.
I talked to the accountant for the tax exempt status. The App was 35 pages long. He has never filled one out before. But some HOA’s are tax exempt and chances are that it will probably be approved. There are many questions on the app. You need to submit the bylaws and everything for the HOA. We can attempt to do it all on our own. But bc we are so small and main purpose is pier, we will probably only have to pay taxes on any dividends or interest. We will still have to do a tax return…but it has been relatively small. That’s dues, but not income. There is one statement that asks if you are submitting 27 months after forming the association. So, I pretty much avoided that.
Don D- We need our bylaws and covenants. I wish that John were here. We need to get this going. We’ve had a rough draft from the beginning.
Rita- It wasn’t really even a rough draft. It was just where we started.
Don D- If we need to, we may have to get someone else to take it over if he’s too busy or something like that.
Ray- Bob and Kathy left for vacation. That’s why they couldn’t make it tonight.
Don- We’ve got one more thing under old business. That’s our pier work. I finally got a hold of the guy form the State back in December. We put the drawing together and then we had to have a layout of what we have down there right now and went down there and measured all the piers down there and got it all formalized and then actually Bob said that he’s going to do some work on his pier too.
Ray- Yeah, he needs to put another pole in and add a finger pier or something like that.
Don- I spoke with the guy. I called him and told him what we have. And he said that we probably can’t do that. And, If it’s more than 200 square feet…..but you have to go back to 200 sq feet. He said send it to me and maybe we can go out further. But we’re already at the 25% line. Actually some of the pilings are further already, so we can’t go out any further unless he gives us an exemption. He said, unfortunately I’m leaving for vacation now and won’t be back until Jan 4. So yesterday, I faxed him all our drawings and information. He just got them yesterday…how long it takes him to look at them I don’t know. And now I’m leaving until March.
Jan- Are you just waiting to see what he says? Is that the Army Corps of Engineers.
Don- Yes. And once he okays it, then the rest of it is all formalities. My original idea was to go to the county. But the County says that maybe you need to go to the State. But now it comes down to that you HAVE to go to the State.
JO- Now the Corps comes before the State, then the county.
Don- They are sometimes one in the same. But it sounds like this guy is the first in the pecking order. I’m hoping that he’ll call me and say that he’s looked at it. But he’s not saying “no, you can’t do it.” Hopefully I can go in and sit down with him at some point. But I think he likes to do a lot of it by email. We’ll take a laptop with us so we can check it every once in a while. I’ve got everything that I sent him here. Joe, you can talk to him.
Joe Z- Okay. Where’ his office at? Do you know? (His phone number 410-537-3845. Robert Cuthbertson- DOE. Dept of Water Quality.) I sent him a drawing of the existing pier, our original drawing that would give us 9 slips. Then also something with the pier slanted, following the creek line. But what he’ll approve and what he’s going to do we don’t know. Joe I’m going to give this to you in case there is something that you’ll have to do, you’ll have copies of everything.
joe Z- okay.
Don d- He seemed a little skeptical. But then I thought, maybe we should just get rid of the “T” and make it an “L.” One other thought that Greg and I actually even talked about. If we went out half way and put a couple a pilings and a finger pier…we can get 2 more slips in shallower water. If we can get…until we know what we can get approved…we don’t know what it will cost or how many slips.
Joanne- So, we are kind of at the approval process?
Don- That’s right. If’ I haven’t heard from him in 2 weeks, I’d figure I’d call him. But we don’t want to pressure him too much. We don’t want him to drop us to the bottom of the list or tell us that we just can’t do what we want to do.
Ken P—What about all that I heard about the wanting to improve the quality of the Bay.
Don- That’s why they don’t want the big “T’s” because they want the sun to reach the bottom vegetation. It keeps the sun off the water. It affects the water quality. Anyhow that’s where we stand and hopefully he’ll give us some options.
I told him that we’re a community and have 11-12 homes that are looking to maximize our water usage.
Don D- We can go down to four feet wide. Hopefully we can go in to talk to him.
Ray- I think personally if you can talk to him face-to-face it would be good.
Don d- All we want are the slips.
Anyway….we can discuss this pier thing all night. We should have caps on all the pilings. We should probably go ahead and cap them sometime this spring. And we can do that.
Greg- I think that Bob said that he’d get us some metal to cap them.
Ray- Yeah, he said something like that.
Don- We need to cap the ones that are there. They’ll last a lot longer.
Ray- I think that Bob said that he’s going to donate a lot of that stuff. They come back on Tuesday.
Don- One of the things that I did put on the drawing is what the stringers are going to be. I put down 3×8, which matches almost what is under the pier. But those stringers need to come out because they are not to code. But we can use those 10-foot stringers so we won’t need to buy a lot.
One of the notes that I had was to take care of new business….. THE SPRING FLEA MARKET.
I understand that the last one was pretty good. We need to find out when the Church does their thing. We’ll just tie it in with the church down the street. We can have it in the street, but you just can’t block the mailboxes.
Rita- It would start early in the morning and probably be done by the time the mail lady comes around.
Ken- Easter is April 4th.
Don- It’ll be sometime mid April or in early May.
JOANN- Something came up with the snow. We should all buy a snow blower. That way we could all just chip in and all use it. So give that it doesn’t snow that much around here. We can just chime in if anyone wants to do it.
Don- I think we have enough snow blowers in the neighborhood. I have one, John has one, Ken has one and Joe had one if he can get it running, If anyone needs one, come and use mine. It’s there.
Greg- I think that since we have so many that we can just borrow a neighbor’s if needed. I have a bunch of tools and if anyone wants to borrow anything that I have, it makes me happy that it’s getting used.
JO- So, how about our next meeting.
DOn- If you want to have one in FEB, that’s fine. But I don’t think we need one. If something comes up with the pier, Joe and Greg or whoever can take care of it.
JO- Unless something is going to happen, I don’t really think we need one.
RAY- I’m trying to talk to a friend of mine about electrical to see what we can do about the electrical box. We can attach it to the Gazeebo. You can put a post up.
Don- The cable has to be about 20 feet high.
RAY- I used to do that stuff all the time. But if they disconnect it from the pole and then drop it, We can connect it all at the ground. Then when they hook it all up, BGE will come out and do it.
DON & Company_- Discussion about inspectors and permits. I think we need to wait until everyone goes away and then run it.
DOn- We talked about flea market. Do we want to have a Feb meeting? Voices – (NO)
Don-Okay.
DON-As far as the peir…. We don’t know how much it’s going to cost. My guestimate is $25-30K. that’s just the pier. It may be more than that. It may be $40k. We are not financing it. I’m not going to put my name on it. Banks aren’t going to write a loan on something that they can’t repossess. One thought is that we can get more than one slip. Say we get 8 slips and only 6 people want slips. Then maybe some people could put up the money for multiple slips. Then maybe a couple of years down the road, they could sell it for cost plus interest to another neighbor. It almost comes down to one person financing for another. But that would have to be a standard loan practice etc. If you don’t live here, you can’t buy a slip.
Rita.- I don’t think anyone should be able to make a profit on it. Or atleast an unreasonable profit on it.
Greg- Well I don’t think that you should limit that. A slip costs $3-4,000 per year to rent. If people don’t realize the value of getting a clip for the life of the pier for a similar amount, then they should have to pay what the market values it.
Carrie- I think it would be good to keep it in the association. Then if the homeowner wants to buy it later, then they could.
Don- Well that’s not going to work because the Home Owner’s Association doesn’t have the money to buy the slips either.
Ken- I would be interested in having a slip, because I am getting of the age where I am thinking about selling the house and I would want to have a slip to go with the house.
Don- We will have to find out who wants slips. Who knows that they want a slip today? And, who wants slips but doesn’t want to pay for them today? Some will be priced differently depending on the quality of the slip.
NOTE: Lots of hypothetical discussion on costs of slips and how to structure the cost of slips. To much at once to record.
Tally : Don, Greg, Mike, Joe Z, John L, Ray, Ken P., Joe Herring (they all want slips for sure)
Ray – Joe wants one but he doesn’t think he can afford it. John M said he’s not interested now, but maybe in future. Bob doesn’t want one.
Motion to adjourn.
Second.
Adjourned 8:15pm.
Meeting Minutes: recorded by Greg Whitesell- secretary
(Note: These meeting minutes are an attempt to record as much as possible that took place during the meeting, but not nearly everything said was recorded. As they are not transcribed from a tape, nor are they all inclusive, they are not meant to be direct quotes from anyone or to be used as legal documentation. Rather this is an attempt to provide a degree of transparency of the proceedings and to serve as a casual record for both those in attendance and for those who were unable to attend. There is quite a bit that was said that could not be recorded, therefore, consider the minutes as a bit of short hand with some exclusions. Thanks, Greg.)