What is the Morrison Ranch Community Council?

This article in the Arizona Republic raises the specter of HOA trauma:

Les Presmyk knows all too well how rocky the transition of power from developers to homeowners' associations in neighborhoods can get. Presmyk, a
Gilbert Town Council member and president of The Leadership Centre, was among the HOA board members in the Islands who ended up in court after their neighborhood's developer went bankrupt in 1989. The Leadership Centre, an HOA education institute, is offering a class Saturday for homeowners to avoid those types of conflicts and be prepared to make the transition smoothly from developer to homeowner control.

Back in the day, when Morrison Ranch was still in the vision stage, we looked around to see how other communities had successfully negotiated the issues surrounding HOAs. Bias For Action became our resident expert on HOAs, spending many hours in various meetings and fully educating himself on ways to enhance Morrison Ranch and benefit the residents. We decided to loosely model the structures at Anthem and DC Ranch, and thus was born the Morrison Ranch Community Council.

The Council is an overarching entity that handles many of the functions of the typical HOA; all the maintenance of all the open space, whether residential or commercial, is overseen by the Community Council. That includes the lake and park next to Farm Bureau as well as the strip of turf and trees in front of the houses, and much much more. There is also a companion entity, the Morrison Ranch Residential HOA, and this entity is the one that has the oversight of things like basketball hoops and not leaving your trash cans out in the street for too long. I don't know the actual mechanics of the transaction, but the homeowner pays monthly dues that are somehow divided between the two entities. Higley Estates will be the first residential community to operate under this system; Higley Groves East and West each have independent HOAs. Perhaps at some point in the future, these HOAs will have agreements with the Community Council, but at this time they are separate.

We think this arrangement enhances all of Morrison Ranch; we want the HOA system to do what it was originally intended to do: maintain property values while serving the residents.