Outline of Content

Overview of Green Tree HOA

Roles of Board and Management Company

Finances

Browning Reserves

Bylaws: How We Govern Ourselves

CC&Rs: How We Like to Live in Our Community

Meetings, Communicating, and Daily Life of a Board Member

Insights

Overview of Green Tree HOA

The Green Tree Homeowners’ Association is a community of 203 TownHomes and 59 Single-Family Homes located on Greenberry Drive, Hackberry Lane, Muldrow Road, Esrig Drive; and Summertree, Wintertree, and Autumntree Courts. Here is a basic map.

We use the terms Common Area to refer to the TownHomes properties and Rec Area to refer to the Clubhouse (recreation) property. These terms are significant also for financial purposes, which you’ll read about later.

As you will see in our Bylaws later, we have provisions for a 9-member Board of Directors. It is our practice to hire a management company (currently Silvercreek) to help us manage the responsibilities of the Board and the needs of the Community. Like most HOAs, we also have a regular attorney (Rosalind Olson), but unlike most HOAs, we have our own separate accountant (Ryan Lucksinger) rather than having the management company manage our finances. This is a very good thing.

Roles of Board and Management Company

The Board of Directors is a set of volunteers from the community who agree to give up their free time to help manage the community’s needs. We have officer roles of President, VP, Secretary, and Treasurer; the latter 2 have been vacant for a while but hopefully will be filled soon. (BTW, board members are all uniformly either elected or appointed, and then the board itself decide who will fill the officer roles).

The Management Company (Silvercreek) is supposed to do all the heavy lifting, leaving the governing to us board members. This heavy lifting includes liaising with and serving the community in the daily transactions necessary to maintain an HOA: dispatching contractors for repairs to the common area or rec area, tracking ownership and renters of the properties (when owners are cooperative and provide this info) , organizing and supporting board meetings, and generally being of service to the Board in the regular operations of the community. [Note: the Board is still responsible for the community! When the management company is negligent in any way, the Board must step in. We are responsible for overseeing the management company. Thankfully, we do have a kind of “workers compensation” insurance so that we as private individual volunteers are not held responsible for things that go sideways because of the faults of others.]

Finances

Finances of this HOA are a bit complicated. The Single-Family Homeowners pay fees only for use of the Rec Area (CLubhouse, pool, game room, garden area) while the TownHome Homeowners pay fees for use of the Rec area as well as care and maintenance of the Common Area.

About half of all incoming fees are put into an “Operating” fund that we use for our yearly expenses such as the pool, landscaping, paying the management company and other vendors such as Lucksinger or contractors who do maintenance at the community. This operating fund is shaped by our annual budget, which is built each year by Lucksinger and the Board (drafted and approved in late Fall for each following year).

As you might imagine, it’s a bit tricky to make sure that the two classes of homeowners (SFH Homeowners and TH Homeowners) contribute equally to the operating budget. Accordingly, as you will see in the annual financial reports mailed to your homes, the SFHH are responsible for 42% of the costs of the Rec Area while the THH are responsible for 58%. However, Landscaping is split in a 95%/5% split between the THH and SFHH accordingly. There are other formulaic splits in other categories, and Lucksinger can provide this info if you’re curious.

The Treasurer monitors all invoices that Lucksinger sets up in the payment portal and approves them when appropriate to pay those who are owed $ from Green Tree HOA. The Treasurer also provides a brief report at each open board meeting (data provided by Lucksinger in his monthly financial report that he mails to each board member). The president is the second approver of all these invoices. Because we don’t have a treasurer at the moment, the president is the single approver of all expenses. Please try out the role of Treasurer! It’s the best way to get to know the HOA!

Browning & Reserves

The half of funding that goes to the Reserves account is plunked into an account but considered (on paper) to be divided or categorized and allotted according to an elaborate plan called the Browning Reserve Study. The Browning Group provides expertise in this area for HOAs and assesses our property to help us determine where we should be spending our Reserve funding (our “savings” account) on specific upgrades and maintenance.

When you look at the Browning reserve Study–BTW there is one complete study for the Rec area and one for the Common area–you see an overview and numerous categories of projects such as paving, concrete, and painting. The diagram below from 2019 was my way of making sense of the way the finances are organized.

When you can, take some time and familiarize yourself with the way the Browning Report is organized. In the spreadsheet section, there are categories of projects on the left column and columns to the right for each year in the future with amounts that browning expects the HOA will need to spend toward the projects listed on the leftmost column.

Bylaws: How We Govern Ourselves

Bylaws are the rules that were set up to determine how we govern our community; they direct the Board and the management company in how we shall run meetings, when we have them, how we elect Board members, how we shall insure our property, etc.. Please familiarize yourself with them.

CC&Rs: How We Like to Live

Most of us are familiar with the CC&Rs; they dictate how we want the community to look, what membership in the community means, and generally what rules we all need to follow on a daily basis.

Meetings & Daily Life of a Board Member

The most critical role of a Board member is to engage with the materials of every Board meeting and represent the interests of the community. Ideally, Board members have projects they are overseeing on behalf of the Board; for instance, Renee oversees parking, and Susan oversees the Clubhouse and Barbara oversees the pool area. These are all subject to the ongoing discussions of the Board and merely a way of ensuring that we are doing our best to manage the community as best we can.

About a week before monthly meetings, Silvercreek will send us our “Board Packets,” which is a large file that contains all the relevant meeting materials such as the agenda, minutes from the prior meeting, the financial packet that Lucksinger sends us in a separate email, vendor proposals, and any important communications. We usually get 2 files–one for the executive session and one for the open meeting. The executive session, by the way, is where the Board discusses confidential matters such as vendor contracts for individual homes, member discipline, and accounts of members in arrears.

Between meetings, the president is usually the primary liaison with the Silvercreek management team, fielding inquiries and making decisions about specific situations such as ongoing projects. When the issues are related to areas that individual Board members are overseeing, those board members also communicate with Silvercreek and or other board members between meetings. Sometimes emergencies pop up and Board members need to help. For instance, someone reached out to me tonight because her kitchen ceiling fell in. It ended up being a plumbing issue on the second story, and a plumber quickly was dispatched to help her out.

Never a dull moment on the HOA Board.

Other day-to-day activities of a Board member include keeping eyes open for areas where we need to fix something, improve something, stop unwanted member behavior, and generally reporting to Silvercreek which of these tasks we need them to do for us. (Note: Sometimes if too many Board members contact a manager too frequently, they will ask that these be funneled through the Board president.)

Insights

Remember that you represent the community and are working on behalf of (y)our neighbors. People see us as representing the decisions of the Board, which sometimes are not popular and often misunderstood. And unfortunately, few people in the community have the time or energy to stay apprised of what it takes to manage the community. As a consequence, they can easily be upset with us as individual Board members. Try not to let that bother you. All we can do is to try to educate our neighbors about what makes their community run smoothly.

I’ll add to this section as I think of important things to share. One of the most important is this: despite paying a management company to do many tasks for us, we must be vigilant in overseeing them. We are ultimately responsible for the community’s success. For instance, we had a manager not so long ago that neglected many projects and provided bad advice, so the Board had to gradually take over projects until a more competent manager replacement was provided and gradually took back responsibilities. Always keep an eye on it all as much as possible.

Most importantly, remember that we can only do the best we can. Let’s try to have some fun while we’re at it!