Daily Herald | Dispute over Palatine subdivision unsettled; will come up again April 20: "The Palatine Village Council has pushed back the vote on the proposed changes for the Maison Du Comte subdivision near Harper College to April 20.
Despite a council chamber full of residents Monday night, the board reasoned without a homeowners association representing the residents, they didn't want to take a vote.
'I can't go from door to door and meet with every husband and wife and find out what they want,' Councilman Mike Jezierski said."
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Welcome to Palatine, Illinois, where only HOAs have standing to represent the interests of home owning residents of the community. Homeowners, go home. I keep telling people that HOAs have become an extension of local government. Now do you believe me?
4 comments:
Many moons ago I was told by a very good friend of mine that local governments were using HOAs to distance themselves from their constituents. He was convinced county and city Supervisors/councilmen or whatever they call themselves thought of themselves as royalty rather than the public servants they were. At the time I didn't believe him.
Unfortunately I had my own experiences with my District Supervisor whom I have known for all the 21 years she has held that office. I made an appointment to see Sharon but was then bumped off to her Chief of Staff as her office apparently did not know of another commitment she had for that day.
Her staff had called in reinforcements from the county and when I walked into the office, I felt I had run into a brick wall. They were on the defensive, cagey and not particularly pleasant. I only wanted some information about a 2 1/2 acre parcel of land we had been using as a mulch site for years, recycling all the leaves and tree trimmings from the 100 place acres of common space we have. All of a sudden we were told by the county we could not longer use the land and had to let it grow over and become "untouched" land. It looks like an overgrown jungle now, unkempt and useless.
They were supposed to get back to me in a few days with the answers to my questions regarding the land. Several weeks later when I called to find out what had happened I got a very rude, "we've been busy but we'll get to you soon." response. A few months later as I was walking into the grocery store, Sharon's Chief of Staff was walking out and when she saw me she rolled her eyes up. Her excuse this time was she had had an abscess or a root canal or something along those lines? It took months?
Anyway, after several months I got a letter from Sharon. The letter was addressed to the board of directors of my HOA, with a copy to me, telling the board that I had been into her office inquiring about the "mulch site" and after much research they had concluded that the land was zoned for open, undeveloped land and could not be used for anything at all. She didn't have the decency to respond to me and copy the board if she felt compelled to tell them about it.
Beyond that, Fairfax County's Consumer Affairs Department regards the association as the consumer and NOT the individual tax payer/voter when it comes to problems with associations. They even go so far as to have an official liaison to CAI. This guy uses tax dollars to host a TV show called "Your Community, Your Call". http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/cable/channel16/your_community_your_call.htm It's a call-in show where the HOA attorneys and managers field questions and have been known to give misleading information.
There is no question that the individual homeowners are second class citizens. And unless they assert their rights they will keep getting swept away.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, we interviewed Sharon Bulova on the progenitor of your current weekly broadcast, On The Commons.
I remember the interview well because Bulova explained the fiscal element driving local government privatization via local land use policies containing HOA mandates.
Bulova explained that the trend is being driven by taxpayer resistance to funding public local government. So local officials essentially reply, "OK, then we'll privatize it and you'll have to deal with your HOA board as your first level of local government."
The insertion of that additional layer of local government, particularly in locales like Northern Virginia where HOAs are omnipresent, likely explains the political dynamic you are experiencing with your county representative.
These county/muni elected reps likely regard the HOA as the local government of first resort and that you should therefore address local government concerns to the HOA and not them.
The problem of course as you observed is that the elected county/muni reps become distanced from their constituents which can't bode well for them come election time when voters ask themselves, "What have they done for me lately?"
I remember the interview very well. Sharon denied the mandates existed when in fact they had been in place since the mid 80's.
One of the candidates for Chairman of the Board of Supervisors in Fairfax County during the last election discovered hundreds of fees and taxes the county was charging. This includes getting a permit to replace a hot water heater. If there was an inspection following the installation of the heater I'd understand but no, it is just another junk fee that the sheep in Fairfax pay the over bloated government.
My grandson and his dog were attacked and bitten by a Doberman in the neighborhood. Although at first they were not going to report the incident to animal control in Fairfax, they changed their minds when they found out that the same dog had attacked and bitten other people and animals in the neighborhood. The owner could not control him and every time something happened, she would cry and beg the folks not to report it. Anyway, when animal control came to interview my daughter, she was cited for not having a $5 license for her dog. She got the dog from someone else and was not aware she had to pay the county a fee. And the Doberman? The county did absolutely nothing about it.
Fairfax is $650 Million plus in the hole. Taxes go up, they add new ones, new fees, new bureaucracies, more clerks, more buildings, more offices. The whole place is bogging down under the weight of sheer and utter incompetence but it's OK, the tax payers will foot the bill and then you have the brain dead among us who think it is such a grand way of doing things and they really don't want their "services" to go down. They probably don't realize those services are not being provided by the county but their HOAs.
And the beat goes on and on and on.
The beat may go on but it's not inexorable. The privatization of local government is the sum of our choices in a number of areas. But it is essentially a public policy choice where we have said we're OK if political subdivisions of the state only extend so far before they fade out and private corporations assume the role of municipalities. I believe that choice is in error. Private nonprofit corporations can play limited roles in providing local public services such as telecommunications cooperatives. But they cannot assume the role of providing general governance functions. The experience of the past four decades have shown CIDs/HOAs are ill suited to be in that role.
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