Important - Recommendations for Punta del Burro

Goals

After spending the past several months investigating our current situation, I have come to several important conclusions about how we should proceed with the Punta del Burro home owners association. I have personally spoken with many of you, and would like to thank each and every one of you who has helped me and voiced their concerns and opinions.

The single most important consideration which faces the members of our community is the maintenance of property values. It is likely within the next several years that the combined value of our properties will exceed one hundred million dollars. With this much money at stake, it is reasonable and prudent to invest time and money to protect these investments. This should always be kept in mind as we proceed with our other goals.

Since each house in the community does not have individual electric service from CFE and the infrastructure for this utility is currently owned in common, the next main goal of the HOA should be to do the billing and collections for this service. If service were to be terminated for lack of payment those with direct payment to C.F.Electric are not immune because of the main CFE line that runs down from the highway servicing the community. We will need to create an organization so that we can have the CFE bill put in our name. It needs to be taken out of Pasquritos (the old company) in the very near future.

We have thoroughly investigated how much it would be to change this situation, and the cost to fix this problem is prohibitive at this time. We would have to pay many hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace the current lines, poles and transformers; and the current system does work. Besides, there are much more pressing projects which need to be defined and completed before this becomes important.

These other projects include road paving and gate security improvement. These projects should both be handled by a community organization as they affect most of the home owners in PdB. If we implement these projects it should help satisfy the question of where the monthly dues of $200 is spent. I believe this number can be reduced once we get a handle on all of our expenses in the future.

The community also needs group representation, as many home owners do not even live here full time. Furthermore, many of the members would rather not be intimately involved with the day-to-day responsibility of dealing with these problems. They would prefer to delegate some responsibility to someone who lives here and can take the necessary time to do these jobs right. For example, the current challenge to the Alta Vista road usage rights falls in this category and is presently being reviewed by our attorney. There are and will be from time to time other issues for which it is easier for the community to be represented by a spokesperson. A good example of this is environmental compliance with Mexican laws in regards to new construction, tree removal, etc.

Problems with Current HOA

At first we were under the impression that we could rescue the old HOA. Further investigation by the Attorney has brought up some problems which make this unfeasible. The main problem is that there are no books or records. While this could be addressed fairly easily as far as minutes and bylaws, the absence of financial records and annual statements makes the organization subject to fines. Since this has been going on for almost ten years, these could be substantial.

The old HOA was relatively informal and run mostly by one person, Roy Gibb. (I should also mention Bob Shelton for his unrelenting efforts while running the PdB show.) While we are grateful to Roy and Bob for the fine job that they did over this time period, there is now too much work for one person to do. There was also not enough oversight, and we have a lot of unaddressed issues which need to be taken care of in the immediate future. In addition, some of the billing is being done through a corporation which no longer exists, which again creates some legal questions.

Recommendations

Thus my recommendation is that we form a new PDB HOA. This involves forming a new corporation with a new charter. We also need at least three corporate officers. I will serve as one of the 3 officers only if we get the kind of response that we received in the forming of the water company ODSYS...close to 100% participation. It's very important that you each respond via an email reply, one way or the other no later than May 6th so we can move on this. I will be more than happy to answer any questions as to our progress.

Next we should establish a new organization with oversight. This organization will consist of several home owners who are willing to spend time in this function, which includes developing the organization, getting employees, and finding the service bureaus (accounting and legal) necessary to keep things running. We also expect that our website can be used to keep people informed about what's going on, provide a place for discussion for both new and old projects, and keep an audit trail of where we've been.

Friendly reminder: please hit "reply" to this email.

Thankyou
Joe Refsnes