We previously announced a Town Hall meeting for 11am on March 21 at the Roma Park Ramada/picnic area. Due to COVID-19 concerns and to facilitate more participation, we’re moving this meeting to an electronic meeting… same time and date: Saturday March 21 at 11am.
Now you can participate from your computer or smart phone wherever you happen to be. I recommend starting the connection process 5-10 minutes ahead of time. Go to this page for details on how to join the meeting.
You can get your March 2020 news in so many ways!
If you want to watch (or re-watch!) specific items from the YouTube video, but don’t want to wade through all of them, look for the topic below and click the link to go direct to that topic in the video:
It’s hard to find a meeting location that is affordable, reasonably close by, available year-round, and with adequate facilities. The meeting location we’ve used for the past year significantly raised their rates once we changed management companies, and the accommodations were often noisy and accompanied by problems with building access. We met for a long time at nearby schools, but they’re closed (or difficult to get access to) in the summer and we often had problems getting the rooms unlocked.
So, starting with the March 2020 meeting, we’re going back to the Avondale Civic Center located at 11465 Civic Center Drive in Avondale, along Avondale Blvd just south of I-10. Their rooms are spacious, easy to set up, generally have overhead projectors and WiFi availability, good bathroom facilities, and a guard who ensures we have access and provides a level of facility security we don’t have at other venues.
Almost as hard as finding a place, is finding a date where all of the five board members are able to attend. People are busy! To help us maximize board participation, we might shake it up a bit and meet in different weeks of the month, but it’s shaping up that Thursdays are more available for most of us. That’s why you’ll see the March meeting is the second Thursday of the month.
See this page for more information about the meeting location and other details.
All members of the association should have received the notice from the new management company by now. If you have not, or if you need more information, please contact PDS (Planned Development Services) at 623-877-1396 for assistance.
Of particular importance is the change in mailing address and account number for your 2020 first quarter assessments, due January 1, 2020.
Two meetings this month. Read this announcement!
There will be a Special Board Meeting for the Rio Crossing Homeowner Association this Saturday, November 16 at 11am at the Ramada adjacent to Roma Avenue at Roma Park.
The topics are:
Some of these topics were taken from the planned agenda for the Regular Board Meeting, in order to ensure that Wednesday’s meeting would be completable on time.
All homeowners are invited to attend.
The Regular Board Meeting for the month of November is scheduled for Wednesday November 20, 2019 at 7pm at the Palm Valley Community Center. Note this is being held on the third Wednesday of the month.
The draft agenda is available here. Note that some of the topics from this Regular Meeting are now scheduled for the Special Meeting noted above.
The regular monthly meeting of the Design Review Committee will meet at 6:30pm, just before the Regular Board Meeting.
Watch our Reserve Study video on our YouTube channel!
The association recently received an updated Reserve Study. What it that, and why is it important to you?
First of all, there’s the Reserve Fund. That’s a special account set aside where the association puts money every month for certain maintenance activities on community common areas. The Reserve Study is the association’s complete go-to guide for everything related to that fund, the maintenance activities needed, and how much we should be putting into it each year.
The most recent document is available for you to view and download here.
We’re planning a series of brief videos to explain the general topics of Reserve Funds and Reserve Studies, and also on the details of our own Reserve Study and what it means to you, an owner in Rio Crossing. Our Reserve Study has a description of a lot of this, but it’s in somewhat technical terms, so we’re hoping that the video series will help everyone understand more visually.
But we encourage you to download the study from the link above and read through it. Particularly interesting is the complete list of association assets in the “Component Detail” section on pages 14-65 (the page numbers at the bottom of each page; it’s pages 29-80 in the Adobe Reader window).
Also interesting is the table of annual financial projections on page 4 (page 19 in the Adobe Reader). The Member Contribution column shows how much of members’ assessment dollars will go into the Reserve Fund each year. While it looks like a lot, it’s not as big as you think! Take the number in that column and divide it by 345 (that’s how many owners/members there are); that gives you the annual contribution per owner. Then divide that by 4, and that’s how much of each quarter’s assessment goes into the fund.
Here’s the breakdown for 2020: the full amount is $56,114. Divided by 345 gives you $162.65 per year per owner. Divide that by 4 and you see that only $40.66 of your quarterly assessment goes into the Reserve Fund.
Want to learn more about the Reserve Fund, or other parts of your association’s finances? Let me know what you want to know by filling out the Feedback Form here.
Last year’s Winter Festival was a big hit… so we’re doing it again this year! Here’s a message from our Social Committee chairperson Andres, who has been working very hard behind the scenes to get this fantastic event ready for you:
We are excited about this year’s Winter Festival taking place in Roma Park on Saturday, Nov 23rd. We’re planning on having about 4 tons of real snow delivered, Santa arriving by Fire truck, a Bounce House, a professional DJ playing music, several activities including games and arts & crafts. The best part of this event will be the 40+ local vendors and food trucks, several of which are offering free services such as face painting, massages and food samples, and others will be offering their goods for sale.
We’re very proud to be able to produce such an exciting and elaborate event. Normally, such an event would be too expensive for Rio Crossing to put on. It’s for this reason we’ve opened it up to other nearby communities – to increase the event’s subsidization and sponsorship. By opening up the Winter Festival to others, Rio Crossing is paying a fraction of what it would have cost if we kept it enclosed. That’s not the only reason though.
In addition to being able to provide these great benefits to our community at a significantly lower cost, we’re marketing Rio Crossing as the family-friendly community that it is, to the rest of the west valley thus improving it’s desirability and home sales in turn increasing our property values. Lastly, we’re helping promote local businesses. The vendors at the Winter Festival are locally run or owned by people like ourselves. All Rio Crossing residents have the opportunity to participate at no cost to them so we encourage you to come out, whether it’s as a vendor selling or promoting your small business or as a guest who’s enjoying the music, snow and shopping.
We hope this brief message answers any questions or concerns you may have. If you still have questions, we encourage you to please attend our next board meeting.
— Andres
I know not everyone gets the email list, and not everyone reads the web site regularly, and not everyone gets our Facebook or Twitter feeds… but here’s another reminder just in case you haven’t heard:
It’s not bulk week this week!
Bulk week is the week of the second Monday of the month, which is Monday October 14. That makes “Bulk Week” October 14-18.
New signs went up at the entrances – or more accurately I suppose, the exits:
Hopefully “those neighbors” you just thought about will see it too.
A handout was available to all members present, with agenda for this meeting, minutes from the 2018 annual meeting, and financial data as of August 31, 2019 (including the balance sheet and the monthly budget comparison statement). [download a copy here]
There was not enough “eligible votes” represented to establish a quorum for the annual meeting, therefore no official association business could be conducted. An informal discussion took place among those attending, which included incumbent board members, one homeowner, two guests, and our community manager.
The incumbent board of directors will continue to serve.
The Annual Member Meeting was scheduled for last Wednesday, September 25. Every year an election for the board of directors is held in conjunction with the annual meeting. A call for board candidates went out in August, and ballots were mailed to the then-current owners in early September.
Though our bylaws permit proxy voting, Arizona statutes now prohibit proxy voting, but allow absentee ballots. “What’s the difference between proxy and absentee?”, you might ask. With a proxy vote, you assign someone else the right to cast a ballot on your behalf; what often happens is that someone goes around and obtains a proxy to vote on behalf of many homeowners and then casts all the ballots for one person, giving the advantage of choice to the person with all the proxy votes. With an absentee ballot, you make your own choice on the ballot and send it in, but you do not have to be present for your ballot to count. This way, no one person can cast all the votes based on personal choice.
Arizona statutes also dictate that absentee ballots “count” when computing the quorum present for a meeting.
A quorum is the minimum number of members that must be present at a meeting in order to conduct official business. (Some people mistakenly think there is no meeting if there is no quorum. This isn’t true, according to most parliamentary procedures, like Robert’s Rules of Order. A meeting occurs when there is less than a quorum present, but only a limited number of actions can be taken by those who are attending.)
Our bylaws require 10% of the membership to be present for a quorum. With 345 homes in Rio Crossing, that amounts to 35 votes (rounding up to a “whole vote”). For this year’s meeting, the number of absentee ballots plus the number of members attending who had not voted was under 20.
Last year (September 2018) we had 46 members (mostly absentee ballots plus a few attendees).
When there is no quorum, there is no election. The election is one of those items of business that can’t be done when there is no quorum.
“Then what happens?”, you might ask. There are a couple of possibilities:
In our case, only incumbent board members were on the ballot, so going to the effort of reconvening at a later date would not really have had a significant outcome other than just allowing the current board to continue. (There would have been one minor difference: one of the incumbent board members did not submit a candidate application for the upcoming year, and therefore if there were any write-ins, a write-in candidate could have been elected.)
If we were just a few members short of a quorum and could have made a quorum later by collecting just a few more ballots or with a couple more attendees, then we might have considered reconvening at a later date. But with barely half the number of required members and the fact that the pool of candidates was essentially the same as the incumbent board, the likelihood of having a quorum at a subsequent session was small and this option was not considered.
Bottom line: the incumbent board members will be retained on the board for the subsequent year.
The Annual Member Meeting and election of board members for the next year was scheduled for last night. Before I give you the results, here’s a quick run-down of what you, as an association member, should know.
In order to “conduct business” at the annual member meeting, we’re required to have a quorum — a parliamentary procedure term meaning “the minimum number of people present to conduct business”. Our bylaws tell us we need ten percent of the eligible voters, and with one vote per lot and 345 lots here in Rio Crossing, ten percent of that is 35 (rounded up to the nearest “whole vote”).
Most parliamentary procedure rules (like Robert’s Rules of Order) say that a quorum has to be made up of people actually present at the meeting, However, Arizona statutes (specifically ARS 33-1812 subsection B) says that anyone who submits an absentee ballot for the election is counted in the quorum computations. This is probably because not many people actually come to HOA meetings, but in many cases, people are interested enough in what happens with their HOA to vote for the board members who represent them.
Last night, there were under 15 absentee ballots, and only 4 members present eligible to vote (and 3 of them had already submitted their vote with an absentee ballot — just in case they were not able to attend).
So essentially we needed 35 voters, and we had less than 20.
Last year — September 2018 — there were 48 voters… more than twice as many as this year. And 2018 was the largest Rio Crossing HOA voter turnout ever. Why the difference?
I don’t really know. I have some ideas. Let me tell you my story about little Timmy…
Little Timmy was 8 years old, but had never spoken a word — not ever. But this one morning, his mother was getting Timmy his favorite breakfast: a nice warm bowl of oatmeal. Timmy dipped his spoon in the bowl, pulled up a nice spoonful of oatmeal, and proceeded to put it in his mouth, as he had done oh so many times before. All of a sudden, Timmy shouted! “Mom! This ^#%@$ oatmeal is too *@&#% hot!!” Both of Timmy’s parent were ecstatic that Timmy, who had never spoken before, was now somehow speaking. Curious to know why, after all these years, Timmy could now speak, his mother asked, “Timmy, why haven’t you ever spoken before?”
Timmy’s reply: “Because up until now, everything has been just fine.”
HOA board members are always happy to hear from owners. Most of us are even pleased when our owners come to us to complain. Perhaps a bit like Timmy’s parents, we’ll ignore the emotional (and sometimes harsh) part of the message, and focus on the fact that we are getting input.
For elections at the national, state, and municipal level, there’s a lot of talk about “voter apathy.” The same sense occurs for involvement and awareness of government operations, things like budgets, rule making, administrative functions, and communication: nobody has time for that; besides, what can I do about it?
At the HOA level, we know you still don’t have much time. That’s why here at Rio Crossing we try to communicate frequently about as many things as we can fit into a relatively small space. You may not read every one of them, but you do hopefully scan the headlines and read the things you think are important.
If you are not on our mailing list, you should be. Click the link and subscribe!
Since the quorum requirements were not met by a long shot, and since the only candidates on the ballot were incumbent board members, the incumbent board members will continue for the next year.
I hope the lack of voter participation this year is an indication that everything is just fine. If not, you will let us know, right?