The Crooked Creek HOA has voted to build new amenities and to privatize the roads and add a 24 hour manned guard gate.
In April 2008 the Crooked Creek HOA Board presented a proposal at it's Annual Homeowners meetings to take over the ownership of the roads from the City of Milton and gate the neighborhood. In addition they voted on a plan to improve the existing communtiy amenities with a nearly $4,000,000.00 investment (more on the amentiy project in a future blog). The gating proposal will allow the community to manage the roads themselves and to add a 24/7 guard gate house and restrict access to the community.
Just over 80% of the nearly 450 votes cast at the meeting were in favor to the proposal. Now the HOA Board needs to work out the details with the city staff and Mayor and Council on what to do next. There are many steps involved including; designing the entrances and guard house, working out future repair needs for the roads and determining exactly what percentage of residents the City Council is going to require to pass the required new City Ordinance allowing the road privatization.
The CC HOA Board is in the process of working through these details now and this will likely take until sometime in early 2009 to work through all the details.
The biggest hurdle is the fact that the existing city requirement for road privatization stands at 100% of the homeowners. This requirement was simply copied from Fulton County when Milton became a city in December 2006. Everyone knows that getting 100% of all 640 homes to agree on something like this will be impossible (getting 100% of people to agree on anything is nearly impossible). Most city governments do not have a similar rule since 100% is so restrictive - others leave it up to a case by case basis. Crooked Creek is asking for the ordinance to be changed to somewhere between 50 and 75%.
The other hurdle is the road repair issue. The Crooked Creek HOA is asking the city to repair the existing roads prior to turning them over to the Community. The neighborhood is roughly 14 years old. The roads were built and paid for by the Developer and Homeowners (as the cost of initial road construction was built into the price of the lots). Fulton County was in charge of road repair for the first 12 years and now the City of Milton is responsible for any repairs/repaving. In that time no repaving has been done and very few, if any, repairs were completed yet many repairs are required and long overdue. In that time of course the residents have been paying property taxes for the roads and have received none to date. Once the Community takes over the roads (assuming everything else works out) the residents will still continue to pay taxes for roads repairs but the City will not be allowed to do any to a private roadway. As you can see the residents argument is that they have paid for the roads and have paid taxes for 14 years and received no benefit from the local government.
To me as a resident, the proposal the board has for the City is a win win. Make some repairs now and never make another while continuing to receive the tax revenue forever. Crooked Creek is 11% of the City of Milton population and slightly more of the property tax base. The community is asking the city for the equivalent of paving only about 1 mile of road now for the trade of never paving or repairing the roads again. Not a bad trade since they get to keep all future road tax revenue.
The design issues mentioned earlier are not a big deal and should sort themselves out quite easily.
I am a resident, HOA board member and area Realtor, and it is my personal belief that gating Crooked Creek will greatly increase demand for the community. I have also discussed this with dozens of other Realtors who know the Community and they feel the same. Many people inside the Community were shocked by the overwhelming turnout at the Annual Meeting and by the huge majority that favored the proposal. Now it's just a matter of time to work out all the details.
So stay tuned to see what happens.
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