The president of the Sixes Road Community Association said as spring comes, and the grass begins to grow, area homeowners are going to notice a difference in the area’s upkeep, as trash piles up and the medians look weedy.
The community association, founded in 2007, has suspended its weekly landscape maintenance along Sixes Road, Bells Ferry Road and the Interstate 575-Sixes Road interchange because of a dramatic loss in membership funds.
The move resulted from the BridgeMill Community Association (BMCA) board of directors’ decision to withdraw from the Sixes association, which is a cooperative association funded by the neighborhood associations in the area. The pullout decreased the cooperative’s budget from $68,000 to $18,000 yearly.
The Sixes Road Community Association President Geoff Jones said the organization is weighing its options.
“There’s no way we can keep up what we have been doing,” Jones said.
The organization, which is an “association of associations,” had the mission of enhancing the appearance of the Sixes Road community by providing weekly landscape maintenance and trash/litter removal along the main roads in the area.
The Sixes group had warning that BridgeMill was pulling out.
Jones said the first year the neighborhoods organized, they assumed BridgeMill would become a member as soon as the community association was released to homeowners from the developer.
That happened, and BridgeMill joined for a two-year membership at the beginning of 2009, but opted at the end of the same year to give a one-year notice that it was dropping out.
Dues to the Sixes Road organization are paid from the homeowners associations of the neighborhoods along the road, at an annual rate of $20 per home. The homes in BridgeMill comprised more than half the homes.
The neighborhoods still participating at this time are Copper Creek, Lake Sovereign, Falls of Cherokee, Cherokee Falls/Estates at the Lake and Highland Point.
“BridgeMill did come back to us and offer to pay $10 per home,” Jones said. “But that’s not really fair to the other neighborhoods, so we’d have to lower theirs to $10, and then we wouldn’t have enough to operate on.”
BMCA president Russ Caso said the board decided to withdraw because it needed the money for landscaping and lighting projects in BridgeMill and along Bells Ferry.
Caso said, “$50,000 is a substantial portion of our budget.”
He said BMCA is still working with the community to determine ways it can cooperate with the Sixes Road organization, and has a meeting set up with Post 3 Commissioner Karen Bosch to discuss the situation.
“We have an extremely low, $150 a year, HOA fee,” Caso explained. “It doesn’t go to the pool or the tennis courts, because those are privately owned. It’s just for landscaping, lighting and maintenance of the common areas.”
Bosch said she was under the impression that BridgeMill withdrew from the association because they could do the work for less money.
“My understanding was that the BMCA said they could keep all of Sixes Road looking good for cheaper than what the association was spending,” Bosch said. “I’m looking into the situation.”
Caso said he’d like to see more participation from businesses in the area. Jones said the Sixes Road Community organization has had “very limited success” in getting business owners to participate.
Jones said the weekly maintenance of the area had given an “enhanced value” to the area.
“We’ve gotten communication from the county that they will not be able to maintain it to the level we are accustomed to,” Jones said. “Drive down any county-maintained road and see what it looks like; that’s not the standards we had hoped for. We wanted weekly, not biannual.”
He said Bosch has told him the county does not have the resources to contribute intensive care to that one area. Bosch said she has told both parties that all they could expect on Sixes from the county was the normal grasscutting and litter pickup like the rest of the county.
Jones said he wants to create a community awareness of the situation and get enough BridgeMill residents to decide they want to participate.
“To me it’s a no-brainer,” Jones said. “It’s money well-spent, to look after the value of your property.”
Jones said the Towne Lake area does not have the corridor maintenance problems the Sixes Road area does, because it is a master-planned community and that is funded and written into the plan.
Caso said he hopes the county could at least become more involved in a coordination of efforts, perhaps facilitating sponsorship arrangements. “There’s a whole load of options; we are still talking about it,” he said.