"Peter:
I would let others on the Board address bare patches, but we did change landscape companies this year. Hopefully, that makes an improvement.

Mason and Rinaldi are maintained by the Porter Ranch Maintenance Assoc not the Sorrento HOA. A few of the newer areas still belong to S&S. At any rate if you have specific sites in mind give the address to Marinel. She will have the landscapers look at it.

On the Meadows gate:
A majority of the Board heard the issues raised by you and others about the security of our community and customer service. Others on the Board looked at that gate as a way to save money. The majority; Melissa, Mary, and myself found a way in the budget to keep the guard at the back gate 7x24 without raising dues this year. We also increased the number of patrol hours without a fee increase from Centurion. I want a safe and secure environment for the whole community, all the time.

On the release of names and addresses of people in arrears to the community:
There are privacy laws that prohibit the sharing of that information with the public. I undrestand your frustration, especially with speculators who are taking advantage of the law, not keeping up their yards, and making the rest of us pay higher dues. But there are also a few homeowners here that did not purchase a home that they couldn't afford, but through no fault of their own, lost a job or had other setback. Most of the Board, including myself, Melissa, and Mary, take our privacy laws seriously. I believe we should not be sharing private information with random residents, or the whole HOA. I hope you understand why that information is private. At the same time be assured that for the whole time I have been on the Board, we have tried to recover every dollar owed to the Association. Most of the time, even during this economic downturn, we have recovered much or all of the money owed us, either through payment arrangements or at the time of sale. Several residents have been foreclosed on by their lender, or declared bankruptcy. We have not recovered from those residents, but we are at least recovering from the new replacement resident. I think our sound policies will keep us secure as the housing market and the economy turn around.

Thank you for sharing your views, and for being an active menber of our community.

Pat Pope
Vice President."

"Lidia:
I will try to answer your questions here.

1. Speeding continues to be a problem. At the last Board meeting the Board voted 4 to 1 to authorize four new speed humps. I have been out of town, but I will try to get the work started next week. That will slow people down in some real trouble spots. Our budget has not been in good shape for more than a year because of the recession. As the foreclosed homes are being sold to highly qualified buyers our budget is slowly turning positive. The Security Committee will be discussing more speed humps, or some enforcement alternatives. Our security cannot pull cars over, by law.

We have looked at alternatives to gate clickers in the past. One technology that is improving rapidly, and going down in price is called RF ID. Instead of a clicker, registered cars would simply drive up to the gate and a chip on the mirror or license plate would allow the car in. If all cars are registered, or a guest checks in on entry, security can record who is speeding and the Board could hold that resident responsible.

The true answer will lie in a combination of these approaches.

2. As far as the gutters go, there are some low spots in the community where water ponds form. There are still several residents that over-water. I saw sprinklers running all during the rain last week.

I am sure the owners of the homes with the ponds are not happy either. The water is coming from uphill of the house with the pond. I know that if it was my house, I would be unhappy with the pond, and would clean up the muck. The problem is in the common area though.

Sadly, one way to discourage flooding the street is to turn your over-watering neighbors in to the DWP. They will educate or fine repeat offenders,

A couple of the Board members feel that our street cleaning service is a waste of money, and we have cut back. How do you feel about that? Should we increase the street cleaning? Should we ask them to concentrate on troubled areas?

Thanks for taking the time to raise these important issues.

Pat Pope
Vice President"

"Carl:
Thanks for taking the time to work with the blog. Your input is well received. Please send a note to security@sorrentohoa.org if you would be interested in working with the Security Committee for a few hours a month. You might even consider running for the Board this year.

I will try to answer your questions here:

1. We should be adding four more speed humps in the next couple of weeks. Speed humps are very controversial in this community. Some residents see the value in specific areas where we have a lot of speeders. Others have low profile cars. I am sure just by answering your question we will get responses with both viewpoints.

2. We did a survey last year; it should still be on the website. A huge majority of our residents want to be able to park in front of their own home, and in their driveway. The bylaws article on street parking has never been strongly enforced by the HOA. I know this rule is very strongly enforced at Renaissance. It has created controversy there.
We park our cars in our garage. They are cleaner that way, and not subject to theft or vandalism, but there seems to be a majority of residents that feels differently. We are enforcing the prohibition on residents parking in the guest spots, or over night at the pools. Again, when this question was blogged before, there were many replies with viewpoints on both sides.

3. I don’t have a problem with online registration, but there are issues. We have a very large population that uses English as a second language. There are many residents who are not on-line.
I would like to explore the use of RF ID, now that the prices are down and our finances are more stable. We have an untold number of clickers out there, and a small percentage of registered cars. This switch could help our residents enter more easily, and we could keep track of vehicles better. If we change entry systems it will take a joint effort with security and volunteer residents to get every car registered. It is a big job with 650 homes.
If you have other issues with Security, please let the Security Committee or Marinel know about them.

4. The instances of gate failure have been reduced since we began doing regular preventative maintenance on the gates. We still have cars hit the gates though. We usually recover from the owner of the car when that happens. The arms all have belts, which can fail without warning. We used to have a handy man that would quickly fix belts. We now have a good gate service that will fix arms and motors as quickly as possible. We will continue to lock the Torino gates when the wind load is too high. We have only done that once since the fall of 2009.
With all of the gates we have 34 motors. Each of the swing gates has a motor that opens the gate and one that closes it. It would not be unusual to expect a motor to fail occasionally. We do our best to prevent the motor from failing, and we do our best to fix a motor quickly. It is not just a matter of keeping a spare motor on hand, because the builder did not use the same motors on all the gates.
The Torino gates are very popular with our residents. They will be even more popular when traffic increases on Mason from new building and the road completion to Sesnon. I will ask our gate guy about a different material. Chain link would be lighter for example, but would look cheap and ugly though.

Again, thank you for taking the time to express your views, and you really should think about joining the volunteer Board."