March Newsletter Keep Avalon Beautiful! Let’s take pride in our neighborhood this spring! Remember to do regular maintenance on your home and yard to keep our community attractive and safe, including: Power washing of homes Pruning bushes and mowing lawns Removing tree branches that obscure streetlights Replacing mailbox numbers to be visible on the right side of the street Repairing or replacing mailboxes with no doors or with rust Recommended companies for mailbox work: Foxy Box Mailbox Makeover LLC on Facebook (affordable and efficient) Old South Ironworks, LLC, oldsouthironworks@gmail.com, 803-295-2748, 803-331-4367. Yard of the Month Resumes Beginning in April, one yard will be recognized as Yard of the Month for its beauty, great improvement or amazing holiday decorations. Winners chosen by the committee (...
Update on June 1 Rules Enforcement Notice
A PDF copy can be found HERE
Original Plan
As part of the annual HOA meeting and in a follow-up letter, the HOA Board agreed to and announced enforcements of our covenants, in alignment with the desires of the neighborhood. We sent out notice that this enforcement would begin on June 1 with the dues notice for community members.
The Loose Thread
It turns out, out of 143 homes, more than 50 of us are breaking the covenants today and would be subject to fines. Every house that makes noise after 10 (e.g. graduation parties), signs for your kid graduating, and your trash cans visible from the road (no matter how clean you keep them) are all violations of our covenants. Have you installed anything in your yard, like a water feature or a new bed around some trees? How about having done some structural improvements to address drainage issues? If you have done any improvement in your yard without a property improvement request (PIR), you have violated the current covenants and are subject to fine. Do you have a satellite dish that is visible from the road? Have you done maintenance on your car in your driveway? Both are violations.
Our point is that the current rules would alienate a significant portion of the neighborhood and would not just apply to those who park on the road and are a nuisance to their neighbors. We cannot selectively apply the rules. It is all of the rules or none of them. As a result, the board is finding a lawyer to assist with the revision of HOA covenants and will have them revised. We will discuss and vote on them in the coming HOA meetings (expect at least July). If you want to be part of the larger conversation, please let the board know @ theboard@avalonhoasc.com and we will include you. However, we need to make these rules more applicable for everyone in our neighborhood, truly in the spirit of keeping up the quality of a well established Columbia community.
Closing Thoughts
As far as violations go, please know that we are working very diligently to correct some of the issues we’ve been experiencing in Avalon. We have to follow all laws via the South Carolina Homeowners Association Act as well as SC property laws and Fair Housing. Violations are not an immediate remedy as discussed in our annual meeting. SC has laws on the amount of time you must give to remedy each notice of each violation. We are working under the guidance of an attorney and professionals in HOA Management and we assure you we’re handling this as swiftly as we can. We have worked very hard with the community to come up with solutions, and we greatly appreciate everyone’s help.
We, the board, are a group of 4 people who volunteer our time and who enjoy and love our community. We are not a full time professional management company, therefore we don’t always have the resources, manpower, or money to be able to handle things the way some other larger communities do. Other communities who have management companies pay at least 3 times our annual dues. If that is something the community wishes to address we can do that at a special meeting.
