To Stenning Woods residents and neighbors. Happy New Year to you and your families. When I accepted the role of President in September 2018, I did so with a couple of strategic goals in mind. Having lived in Stenning Woods for 30 years my wife and I have invested a lot of money in our house with hopes of recovering that investment when we sell in the future. It was my opinion that Stenning Woods was looking old and was not being maintained to a standard that I was used to. Our Deed Restrictions were not being followed by some residents and potential home buyers were telling their agents that Stenning Woods was not an attractive place to live.
In 2018 our yearly maintenance assessment was $190/year with an early pay discount of $165/year. One of my first activities was to perform a market analysis of what other developments were paying for assessments and I found that the average assessment for a development of our size and age in NCC was ~$300/year. We had the lowest assessment with the largest amount of open space and we didn’t have enough money to maintain that space never mind improving the look of Stenning Woods. One of my specific goals was to increase the annual assessment and get it closer to $300/year over time. In 2020 our annual assessment was $250 with an early pay discount of $225. The board is discussing ending the early pay discount in 2021.
We lost our Treasurer and Secretary in 2020 and we have spent a large amount of time trying to fill those roles. We have a new Treasurer but we do not have a Secretary and that role has fallen back on me and the other volunteer members of the Board. Another one of my specific goals was to move as much of the detail work of running the development to A2Z, our property management partner. They have the knowledge, expertise and experience to handle the detail work. Our volunteer board members should oversee and direct our community operations and use A2Z to execute our decisions and objectives, but doing that will come with some additional, but reasonable, cost increases which will change our assessment.
As I mentioned above, Stenning Woods is getting older and more challenging to maintain. We had an expensive 2020 with a number of trees felled during major summer storms, the Spotted Lantern Fly continues to destroy many of the trees in the area and nests have been found in Stenning Woods common space and our retention ponds are older and need more maintenance. This will also increase the assessment over the next few years.
The Board will be meeting to put our budget together and I’m going to continue to push work to A2Z which will improve running our development and make sure the development not only looks good and is being maintained properly. I will come back to you in late February with our assessment recommendations. The budget will need to be voted on at our Annual Meeting, tentatively scheduled for March 17th by webinar. Stay tuned for additional information in mid-February. As always, if you have any questions please contact me directly.
Ralph LoPilato
President, SWMA
(302) 584-3439 cell
