I would like to thank those that took the time out of their busy schedules to attend the meeting and to those of you who registered and voted using our new e-voting system. We appreciate the patience shown while we worked thru setting up owners in the online voting system, and we certainly expect electronic voting to greatly help our HOA in the future.
Unfortunately, we did not reach a quorum again this year. We did have 236 register for e-voting but only 3% voted. We had 109 proxies mailed in and approximately 30 in attendance, a far cry from the 544 needed.
It was brought to our attention during the meeting that there is a lot of misinformation out there on social media. I would like to clear some of this up.
I will start first by explaining the $200 resale fee was NOT an assessment that would be applied to every homeowner in the community. Instead, this fee is only for those homes that are sold, and it would be included in the closing cost. Typically, the buyer pays this fee; since the late 90’s, most Associations have this clause written in their declarations and it is an industry standard today. The purpose of the fee is to help offset the necessary increases in assessments that each owner pays to the Association. The fees collected (Alafaya Woods averages 10 resales per month) would be applied to capital improvements to the community, which would directly and positively impact the property values within our community. Resale fees have a negligible effect on selling homes, and many local communities have fees much, much higher than the one we’ve proposed.
The proposed amendment to reduce the quorum is needed to change our documents, is to ease the effort required to align our current documents with the Florida Statutes. Our current documents are over 30 years old and need to follow updates made to the laws governing HOAs. Reducing the quorum does not take away anyone’s right to vote as some have suggested. Regardless of the size of quorum every owner still has the right to cast their vote!
We are currently following the Florida Statutes for fining and compliance procedures, and our documents allow the current fining process. The amendment that we proposed is just to update our documents to coincide with the State Statute.
The board apologizes for not explaining these amendments in a way that everyone could understand. We hope that owners would choose to reach out to the board via email, or at the regular meetings, with their questions and concerns rather than relying on unverified information from social media. The Board makes every effort to keep residents informed via the community website, www.alafayawoodshoa.com. Please, if you have a question in regard to the HOA, reach out to the board, we are here to help and serve you the homeowner. We can be reached at alafayaboard@alafayawoodshoa.com.
Sincerely,
Julie Childs