What I Get

Meeting your Personal Needs | Current Undertakings, Efforts, and Responses, and more |

What if I’m having issues in our Community?

Know what My Board and Committees are working on

Dear Neighbors of the Sierra Montaña Homeowners Association,

In our experience, we believe we can improve as a community best by starting with some down to earth communications--sharing with you what we know and have learned to help you know that your hard-earned dollars are going towards the right things and into the right efforts for you, your family, and your home. We can always use more helping hands in our committees to help us expand our outreach and improve our connections as a community. We won’t demand much of anyone, but will receive those willing to step up with respect and our support. For those who can’t get involved directly, we hope everything we share here will help you thrive as good neighbors and members of our community.

Sincerely, Your Board

Brian, Candace, Jake, Jason, Josh, Kelly, and Q

Meeting your Personal Needs

Parks and Trails (See Latest Map) – or fancier map from 2020 here

There are 12 parks (many with playground equipment), 6 trails, and 4 walkways of varying distances serving our community. We do our best to maintain these for everyone. Winter grass is on an alternating schedule every three years being rested for better weed control–meaning about a third of grass areas including parks and green belts will be left brown every 3 years, but we’ve split it out into a schedule so there’s green available all year round.

Personal Improvements to your Home & Property

The pandemic has prompted many more improvement projects, and our architectural board led by Jim and Josh have done an excellent job at keeping up with the requests and responding within a couple of weeks for each one. Before you submit a request through the portal (see the sample image below of where to find it in the menu) for any improvements, you should review any guidance for your particular change in the latest Association Guidelines (last updated Nov. 2021) here. Then requests can be made by logging in at the Homeowners Portal and getting to the “Submit an Architectural Request” link on the left menu, as shown below.

Parking RVs

The question has come up a lot lately. As the Association Guidelines  point out, everyone gets 72 hours for loading/unloading your RVs anytime. While it can be disappointing for those who own recreational vehicles and have a double-wide gate, the CC&Rs don’t allow for RV parking (or anything else that clears your wall) in your side yards or driveways. There are options (click here for a Google search on it)--like 303 RV Storage appears to be a nearby, low-cost place to park your RVs.

Current Undertakings, Efforts, Responses, and more

Landscaping: Overseeding

The constant annual overseeding with winter grass over the years has caused some of the weed problems to set in too strongly for chemical controls to stop them alone. A smart landscaping practice is give those areas a break and to “skip overseeding” for a winter to give the ground a rest to kill off those weeds properly. In 2020 when this was first proposed, the HOA board did not want to “brown out” the entire neighborhood at once (especially in that pandemic year), so they agreed to split out the neighborhood into three sections and to overseed on a rotating schedule so there will always be ⅔ of the grass areas in our neighborhood green and available for use and enjoyment, while accomplishing the end objective over a 3-year cycle.

Starting in October of 2022, you can anticipate from this map that the green areas will be overseeded and watered, and the yellow areas will not be.

Did you know that 44% of the money from your HOA assessments goes to Landscaping and 34% to Utilities? Of the just under $2M per year in assessments coming in from over 2,000 homes in our community, water costs us about $600,000 per year or 27% of those annual assessments–be thankful because we brought down the expense from nearly $700K in 2020 by getting a new landscaper, using water more wisely, and avoiding fines in the past as high as $50K for over usage.(Source: 2020 Sierra Montana HOA Report on Finances)

Full-sized picture linked here

Landscaping and weeds by the curbs

Thanks to your help pointing it out and to our community manager Julia in 2021 for painstakingly documenting the areas that had been overlooked and weren’t being addressed in our landscaping contract, the HOA Board voted on August 30th and approved an additional $526/month added to our landscaping payments to Stillwater to cover maintaining these common areas in Loma Linda for weeds and such. These should be addressed quickly in the next two months and be maintained properly moving forward.

NOTE: Based on a homeowner request who wants to see maintenance between the sidewalk and street be done by the landscaper for private property not owned by the HOA, Julia our community manager painstakingly identified an additional 125 areas between walls and sidewalks that meet this private property criteria and got a quote from our landscaper for another $625 a month to maintain them. While arguments ensue between that neighbor, information they’ve researched, etc. the board is also researching this and has not yet voted to spend the extra money to maintain those areas for those neighbors who technically own that property--maintaining the position for now as for all neighbors, that if it’s your property, it’s your responsibility to maintain it.

Playgrounds

UPDATE: Gray Fox Park has the playground replacement completed as of November 2023 with additional repairs and updates to the Ramada there and lighting across all our park Ramadas coming.

Since 2020, our Playgrounds Committee has been constantly and actively assessing the current state of playgrounds, making immediate urgent repairs, and weighing in the balance the replacement of a number of them in the near future. That bill for a replacement playground can easily reach about $100K (for some perspective, we put about $220K each year into reserves).

Granite/Rock

Our Long Term Planning Committee put in a lot of work getting our first granite replacements done and have experimented with landscapers on ground cover solutions where it makes more sense like the gully between our neighborhood and the acre-lot homes over the wall southwest of us (aka Waddell Haciendas). Maps and Planning can be shared here later.

This committee can use more members and help. There is a lot to manage in terms of priorities for long-term repairs, maintenance, and checking into new ideas.

Sierra Montaña Committees as of August 2023:

What if I’m having issues in our Community?

The HOA and Board frequently doesn’t have the authority to help in all matters: While your HOA can enforce things in the CC&Rs and issue violation notices related to not following your Association Guidelines, the HOA or Board in many cases cannot help with all issues you encounter as it relates to the actions of community residents and neighbors. In those cases, you may need to appeal to local authorities, and investigate whether their actions might constitute a code violation. For notes on what those potential code violations are and how you can go about reporting them, here are a couple of resources.

Maricopa Code Compliance: https://www.maricopa.gov/1683/Code-Compliance

Surprise Code Compliance: https://surpriseaz.gov/214/Code-Enforcement

Keep an accurate log of the undesirable activities taking place with photos and any other evidence: What holds true in all cases when you’re seeking help from local authorities, is that keeping an accurate log of occurrences, photos, police reports when available, etc. is often the most crucial thing needed to give local authorities reasonable cause and thereby proper authority to take action. We encourage you to always keep an accurate log of your observations to properly build a case for action.

If the problem you’re dealing with is a common violation to the Association Guidelines, and you feel it important to make a violation report (either via the Homeowners Portal or by calling or emailing the community manager), please take note of the following Arizona laws ARS § 33-1242 and ARS § 33-1803 (a synopsis is shown below–thanks to a neighbor sharing it with us!). While a homeowner is not actively or freely given this information about who reported the violation, Arizona law does allow the homeowner to request it in writing from the property management company, and the property management company is obliged to comply. While it’s also against the law for the management company to share with you any status or violation actions taken regarding a particular property, major violations will typically be found and the commensurate violations issued via the regular community tours done by our Community Manager.

Flock Safety Cameras:

These cameras were placed in late 2020 to all the entrances of our community. You can read more here: Flock Safety Cameras