Large Greenbelt Xeriscape Project – It’s a Go!
We’ve recently been notified by the City of Tempe that our HOA’s neighborhood grant application for the Xeriscape project in the large greenbelt off Mill and Warner has been approved! With Tempe’s matching funds, the project’s costs will be split equally between the City of Tempe and our HOA. Kudos to board members Marsha Speicher and Sharryn Kuhlman for spearheading every aspect of this project.
The project entails replacing the grass along the perimeter of this greenbelt with rock and desert plants. There will still be plenty of grass in the middle of the greenbelt. The goals of this project are to:
- Prevent further water damage to the common walls
- Enhance the greenbelt’s appearance by mixing grass and xeriscape landscaping
- Reducing water usage
The project is tentatively planned for completion this fall. We’ll be sure to take before and after pictures so stay tuned.
Common Area Maintenance
Since the common area inspection in February, the board has been working with our community management company to prioritize and fix many of the outstanding issues, including but not limited to broken electrical boxes and rusted-out utility boxes. For example, as shown in the before and after pictures below, the SRP box on Carver has been nicely refurbished:
What a big improvement! The utility boxes in the greenbelt off Maple and Warner have also been refurbished. Credit for these improvements goes to board members Dan Corsetti and Greg Lind, who completed the property inspection, and our community manager, Scott Darnall, who found the right people at the utility companies to get these improvements done.
Moving forward, we’re still planning to address many of the items from February’s inspection, including sidewalks along Ash Ave, which have been raised by the roots of nearby trees. At the last HOA board meeting, the board also tentatively planned to patch the stucco and paint all the common area walls in the fall of 2016.
New Paint Color Schemes
The architecture committee recently coordinated with Dunn Edwards to update and expand our HOA’s paint palette. Over the past couple years, they’ve noticed a trend towards darker and bolder colors, so the updated paint palette adds 10 darker color schemes, while keeping the existing schemes. This now brings our total number of color schemes to 24, which offers homeowners a wide variety of choices.
The updated paint palette can be seen on the Dunn Edward’s web site:
As a reminder, if you plan to repaint your house (or make other architectural improvements), please be sure to submit a modification approval request form prior to making these changes. The appropriate forms and guidelines are available on our property changes page.
Crime Awareness and Prevention
We fortunately live in a low-crime neighborhood, but it’s always important to be vigilant for crime awareness and prevention. Throughout this year, several board members have become aware of criminal activity in proximity to their own properties.
We’ve added some links to the crime prevention information from the City of Tempe and 3rd party resources like Raids Online. By utilizing Raids Online, you can retrieve a crime map showing when and where criminal activity occurred; they also have an email list you can join to receive weekly crime reports. For example, the following shows 4 burglaries which have occurred thus far in 2015 (versus 2 in 2014 and 2 in 2013) :
Common Area Landscape Update
You may have noticed many bottle trees along Ash and Carver have gone missing over the past few years. After maturing for over 20 years, the roots of these trees have been damaging the common area walls and sidewalks. In the past 2 years, we’ve removed at least a half-dozen of these problematic trees, with a few more on our watch list. Here’s an example of one such tree:
Suffices to say, we’ll never again plant this type of tree near common area walls or sidewalks!
With the extreme summer heat, the grass in our greenbelts often suffers during the summer. We also had a broken sprinkler valve earlier this summer, which interrupted watering until the valve was fixed. As a result, you may have noticed bare spots in some of the green belts earlier this summer, but the grass looks somewhat better now. For example, below are some pictures of the large greenbelt in July and August:
Looking Forward to the Fall
Leading into the October 12th board meeting, the board and our community management company will be focused on formulating a 2016 budget. In general, the financials for our community are looking good, which helps:
- Maintain a healthy reserve fund
- Keep monthly dues low
- Fund some longer term projects such as the xeriscape project in the large greenbelt or repainting the common area walls (planned for 2016)
Finally, thanks to the homeowners who have already signed up for our mailing list. We hope to build upon this mailing list and web site as a primary tool for communicating with homeowners.