With the passage of the covenant amendment in November 2019 it is established that every lot owner must pay annual dues from now on. The Board intends to take any action necessary against any owner who doesn’t pay to make sure that is accomplished. That leaves the issue of past dues from 2019 and earlier that some have never paid. The Board has been hesitant to get into a legal battle over this knowing that the outcome would be uncertain and costly. To get the voting members’ input, we sent out a straw poll in January 2020 asking if we should take collection action to recover unpaid dues from 2019 and earlier. The results were 30 YES-take action and 43 NO-don’t take action. By this time we had reduced the number of owners with unpaid balances from 80 in January 2018 to 22 in January 2020. Those 22 were adamant about not paying the past dues and a few of them hired an attorney to argue their case. The result was the agreement that is found on the website under Documents/Misc. Documents/HAPOA Settlement Agreement Final. The agreement states the Association will forgive the past dues debt, and in return the owner agrees to accept the Association as mandatory and to pay all dues and assessments going forward. In an attempt to bring at least partial fairness to those who have paid dues over the years, the final step will be to refund the owners who have paid dues in the past as much as we can from the Association’s excess funds. There isn’t enough money for a complete refund, it will be a proportional amount according to how much the owner has paid over the years. As of mid August 2020, of the 22 non payers, 16 have signed the agreement and paid 2020 dues and are now voting members of the Association. There are 2 who signed the agreement but did not pay 2020 dues, 1 who did not sign the agreement but paid 2020 dues, and 3 who have not signed the agreement and did not pay 2020 dues. Those last 6 have not had their past debt forgiven and will have collections action taken against them. The Association’s collection policy is on our website under Documents/Misc. Documents/HAPOA Collection policy.
2020 HAPOA Non Payers Agreement-Member Information!
