Annual Letter to Members

ROCKY BAYOU OWNERS ASSOCIATION

January 25, 2022

Dear Rocky Bayou, Greetings from your Board:

Happy New Year and thank goodness for it. We’re all hoping for a more normal year upcoming. I thank goodness also for the homeowners of Rocky Bayou Homeowners Association. So many of you have been cooperative and considerate of your neighbors during some really uncertain and tough times. I’ve heard many times of one of our members helping out when their neighbors have individual troubles as well. Once again, there has been an amazing number of improvement projects visible with just a walk around our streets. The great majority of our owners show real pride in their properties; hence, we are blessed to live in a beautiful set of neighborhoods. We continue to find neighbors who volunteer to help, From my vantage point, here are the issues I plan to bring to our members at our Annual Meeting of the RBOA Membership on March 1st.

1. First, we need to replace three members of our board this year. Our Directors for Environment, for Maintenance, and for Treasurer are leaving the board in March with the Annual Meeting, and we need each of you to consider helping out. Having new people serve on the Board brings fresh enthusiasm to the Board and helps maintain our low rates for members’ dues. We need a steady stream of new volunteers doing this, so that no one burns out and more people understand what the Board does to help maintain our neighborhoods.

Please contact me if you want to volunteer (and thank you for helping).

2. We’ve begun communicating with the RBOA Members more often this year. You may have seen the “BIG NEWS” signs posted at each of our neighborhood entrances a couple of times in 2021. The signs referred you to the RBOA website. There you would see the link to the current BIG NEWS where you could just click on it and read the Board’s latest bulletin. We will continue to keep you updated in this way. It gets you current information while it’s still current. 

3. We request that we be empowered by you to have your email address. Yes, most of you have already given us your email address. With this, we can communicate with you directly when the need arises. Still, we will use the BIG NEWS on our website to avoid having to do that, but we would also like to stop sending out mass mailings through the postal system. We’d like to email you only for the annual assessment of dues. That will save us some money and ease the pressure on us concerning at least one inflationary thing pressuring us on your dues. We did not/not increase the dues this year. We’ll do all we can to avoid it next year.

4. As we told you last year, our 13 different Unit Covenants are mostly outdated and require updating and renewal. We’ve hired our law firm to do that and to try to consolidate them into one to three Covenants, if possible. Florida laws change regularly concerning HOAs and some of our covenants are over 30 years old and far from up to date in relation to those laws. Most of the laws limit HOA options in dealing with homeowners, and those laws should be reflected in our governing documents. None of your covenants, nor our HOA By-laws can change without us notifying you and allowing the homeowners to accept them by voting. We hope to complete this process this year.

The compliance officer’s job is to ensure everyone is following the covenants. This will maintain the integrity and aesthetic value of our neighborhood as well as the value of everyone’s homes. On a whole, 99% of our neighbors follow their covenants and the other 1% correct any issues when they receive a reminder letter.

Two issues that keep coming up are cars parking on the road or on the grass. Though technically not against the rules, your neighbors would appreciate you parking in the driveway. It may require you to extend your parking area as many of us have done. One caveat to parking on the road is parking too close to a corner. That is against County regulations.

NOTE: Gaining compliance from that part of the 1% which Randy finds is resolutely non-compliant will mean notification letters and possible legal action, increasing our expenses. Your cooperation is the best path to a great community. Thank you for your cooperation. 

5. We want to explain the Estoppel Fee which has been in force for all property sales since 2018 and an item of lively discussion among the newer Board members. The Estoppel Fee (maximum allowed = $250) is allowed by Florida statute but has not been voted on by the RBOA membership, only by the 2018 RBOA Board. We’ll explain the pros and cons of this fee to you at the annual meeting in order to gain your feedback on whether it should continue and what, if any, would be the correct rate. Rocky Harvey, our Treasurer will provide you the details surrounding the Estoppel fees.

6. Speeding on Ruckel Drive and other roads within our neighborhoods continues to be a problem. We have many folks who walk or ride their bikes on the road, and given the many curves and hills with many blind driveways in our neighborhoods we all need to be vigilant about our driving habits. Please discuss this with your family members, contractors and friends. We continue to work with the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department on enforcement activities. Together, we can create a culture of respecting the speed limits and make our roads safer. 

7. Finally, we’ll make an appeal that all members permit us to email you. Doing so will save your RBOA an amazing amount of money and Administrative time. In addition, we remind you we have an on line source of information about RBOA at rboa.net.

For all the reasons stated in this letter, we invite all our homeowners to attend the annual meeting on April 6th at the Rocky Bayou Country Club clubhouse. We sincerely hope to see you there for our meeting which will begin at 6:30 PM.

Remember, the Annual Meeting is at 6:30 on March 1st at RBCC Clubhouse.

Sincerely,

Richard L. Comer

President, RBOA