Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The 32 homeowners of the Valley View Estates development on the county’s westernmost boundary are anxious enough to have their dirt road paved that they are willing to pay the price to get the job done, up to a point that is.
That’s the message that Joey Grubbs, the group’s spokesman, has consistently delivered to the Jefferson County Commission.
Members of the homeowners’ association, Grubbs has said, overwhelmingly support the road’s paving and are willing to bear the cost via a special assessment.
Grubbs went so far as to say at a recent meeting that many of the homeowners would be ready to write a check upfront for their portion of the cost, if that’s what it would take to expedite the road’s paving.
“These people really want their road paved,” Grubbs said.
For their part, county officials largely support the project and have been laying the groundwork for the road’s paving. Because the subdivision is a private entity, by law the county is precluded from paving its road, the commission earlier this year adopted a Master Capital Project and Service Assessment Ordinance.
What the ordinance does, essentially, is it sets up a mechanism that allows for the creation of special taxing districts where the county can assess a special non ad-valorem tax on the homeowners who benefit from whatever improvements are made.
The tax collector then collects the assessment annually, at the same time as the ad-valorem taxes. And as with ad-valorem taxes, residents who fail to pay the special assessment would have a tax certificate issued against their property and could ultimately lose the land if they failed to pay. This constitutes “the teeth” in the ordinance, as the legal experts advise.
Determining an assessment that is fair, equitable and defensible in court if an affected property owner were to challenge it, however, is the trickier part of the process and one that requires a detailed study, a task already undertaken by the consultant firm of Government Services Group (GSG).
Besides deciding who will assume the loan for the project – whether the county or the homeowners – and the several resolutions, notices and other procedural steps that must be accomplished before the assessment can be applied, one of the sticking points in the case of Valley View has been how the assessment should be applied. Whether by owner, as the homeowners association wants; or by the lots, as GSG consultant Jeff Rackley has strongly recommended to the commission for the sake of fairness and defensibility.
County Attorney Scott Shirley recently came up with a compressed schedule to expedite the procedural aspects of the process. And at the virtual meeting of the Jefferson County Commission on Thursday, Sept. 17, Shirley came up with a possible compromise solution to the owner versus lot dilemma.
The idea, as best as could be understood given the poor audio, is that the properties of those individuals who owned multiple lots in the development would be combined into one parcel, under a legal term Shirley called “unity of title.” Meaning that for the sake of the special assessment, the fee would be applied against a total of 32 parcels, regardless of how many lots existed within any one parcel, instead of by owner or by lot, of which there are 48 in the development.
The idea seemingly is that if any individual with multiple holdings sells one or more lots, the agreement is reevaluated and the assessment recalculated.
Grubbs praised Shirley for the creative solution.
“Thank you for thinking outside the box,” Grubbs said. “You’ve met us more than halfway. We accept these conditions.”
At part of the deal, commissioners also want assurance that five property owners who reportedly are in arrears on their tax payments bring their taxes up to date, so that the process can start with a clean slate.
Rackley, for his part, presented a schedule of possible fees. Titled a Debt Service Generator, the sheet showed what the annual assessment would be per resident, based on a total project cost of $160,567, and based on a 10-year loan at five percent interest.
All systems seemed to be in line for approval of the measure when one of the development’s property owners raised questions. Or better said, the individual raised questions on behalf of his mother, a widow who owns a five-acre parcel in the subdivision.
The individual first wanted to know who would be taking out the loan for the cost of the project?
The answer was that the county would. The individual then questioned whether the distribution of the assessment by owners was in fact fair to individuals like his mother who owned a single five-acre lot.
Why should his mother pay the same as the individual with several lots, as the latter could always subdivide, he said. The assessment, he said, should be divided 48 ways instead of 32. Apparently, this person hadn’t heard or understood Shirley’s proposed compromise of unity of title.
The mother also noted that when she had voted in the homeowners association for the paving of the road, the cost per homeowner was supposed to have been $4,500, not the current $7,000 of whatever it was.
“That’s not what I voted for,” she said.
Grubbs conceded that because of the several changes had occurred since the association had voted on the issue, it would require a new vote. He also offered that given the new numbers, the association might decide to choose a lower option, which would lower the assessment. The discussion, however, was one that the association needed to have in-house, not during a public commission meeting, he said.
“This is not a county issue,” Grubbs said. “This is a homeowners association issue.”
He also reminded the dissenting homeowners that in the end, the subdivision’s bylaws required a 70 percent majority on road issues.
“All we need is 70 percent of the owners voting to move forward,” Grubbs said, the implication that, if approved, all owners would be subject to the decision.
In light of perceived dissension within the association to the project, some of the commissioners expressed a reluctance to proceed forward. In the end, the commission approved a convoluted motion that tried to accomplish several goals.
The motion was to approve the assessment on 32 parcels, based on the unity of title principle “so that we have a legal leg to stand on,” as one of the commissioners expressed it.
Others of the motion’s elements included that the board’s final decision would depend on the association holding another meeting and coming to unified direction on the project, with the issue to be revisited at a future commission meeting.
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