Dear Editor,
In advance of their Annual Meeting, BSOA recently sent a letter to all Members from the Chairman of the Board. In that letter, the Chairman refers to authorization of a 5% special assessment to pay for speed tables on Little Coyote Road—a project which resulted from a traffic study in 2017. The letter gives the impression that speed tables will not be installed because the Little Coyote Traffic Safety Group has ‘refused to contribute’. That statement is purposely misleading. The Little Coyote Traffic Safety Group is a homeowner task force that does not collect dues, does not have a budget, is not a fund-raising organization, and is thus not in a position to contribute or refuse to contribute to the cost of any BSOA project. However, individual members of the group have in fact contributed personal funds for speed tables on top of the dues they have paid since 2017.
The letter doesn’t mention that BSOA has failed for six years to budget for and manage implementation of the speed tables deemed necessary to reduce liability and risk on a road used by most of the Big Sky Community—not just direct access homeowners. According to their BSRAD funding application—BSOA’s initial plan was to use $53,000 from capital reserves to pay for speed tables. Now the plan is to use zero from capital reserves, hit all homeowners with a maximum special assessment and mandate additional donations from homeowners.
BSOA’s Articles of Incorporation clearly state the HOA is responsible for ensuring safety on the roads within their jurisdiction. Despite that fact, safety is being held hostage by a political agenda—the Board has communicated often they will not install speed tables without additional homeowner donations because they don’t want to create an obligation to do the same in other BSOA neighborhoods.
As a BSOA member—I have questions:
Why are zero capital reserves allocated for the project when members were told at last year’s annual meeting that BSOA had over $600,000 in reserves?
Why did BSOA not budget and accrue funds specifically for these safety devices starting in 2017?
Where did the $600k+ in capital reserves go? Was it used for something more important than safety? Did it go toward the pond ‘activity center’ which the letter describes as an extraordinary achievement from last year?
Why does the Chair’s letter not specify the dollar impact per household of the special assessment? Could it be that dissension between LCR homeowners and non-LCR homeowners was the real goal? Specifying a one-time special assessment of about $27 per household probably wouldn’t generate the discord that fear of a 5% special assessment and blaming certain homeowners does.
More importantly, why is a special assessment needed at all when $47,000 in BSRAD support and $81,000 from Capital Reserves would get the job done?
As the community anticipates continued growth—our HOA should be identifying and implementing safety policy for all BSOA neighborhoods instead of playing a shell game with homeowner money. Surely the board has learned from the speed table debacle that waiting for prices to go down is not a good strategy.
The irony of the paragraph in the letter chastising homeowners for being “solely concerned for their own neighborhoods” is not lost on this reader who sees the real intent: create conflict between the neighborhoods by pointing fingers and failing to mention that Little Coyote Road is unique with traffic volume now comprised of far more than just direct access homeowners.
The BSOA ‘Letter from the Chair’ to all members is shameful gaslighting and an attempt to excuse six years of project mismanagement and irresponsible allocation of homeowner dues.
Jan Weber
Little Coyote Road Homeowner
Big Sky, Montana
