Our Streets Are Public

The East Valley Tribune has an article today about some communities with private streets, and how much it costs to repair those streets - a cost borne by the homeowners:

The pecan trees that line the roads in Gilbert’s Park Grove Estates are nearly 100 years old and create an ambience that’s attractive to home buyers. But many residents who have moved to the nongated neighborhood built in 1984 didn’t realize that the roads — made narrower to save the trees — didn’t meet town codes and had to be made private by the developer.

Now, the 60 homeowners are having to pay about $1,800 each to resurface the aged, cracked and crumbling roads that homeowners association president John Sentz said are often used by drivers who don’t live in the community trying to find shortcuts from Lindsay and Elliot roads.

"When you buy a house in a new development and you’re signing 500 different items, I don’t think people understand what it means," said Sentz, who also is a member of Gilbert’s Planning Commission.

Read the rest of the article if you're interested. At the beginning of the article when it talks about pecan trees and narrow streets, one might be tempted to ask if the same fate might befall us in Morrison Ranch. The answer to that is, no, our streets are public and therefore maintained publicly. Our streets are narrower than the norm for traffic control; we made room for the pecan (and elm) trees from the beginning.

And on a side note for Higley Groves West residents, the HOA board determined at the last meeting that there is indeed enough in our budget to improve the tot lots, install a fertigation system, and replace the lights at the monuments with the kind that can stand up to mowing and kicking (you may have noticed The Mister at odd times hunkered down over one of those light fixtures, repairing it; he's been trying to keep them all going for about a month now. These repairs were not at the top of the priority list for the HOA, so he took matters into his own hands, literally). And the best part of this news is that our monthly assessments are in fact going up next year - by only 35 cents! The Mister has long been a proponent of the motto "Underpromise, Overperform" and that is what our HOA board did in this instance. In our last newsletter, they were cautiously predicting some extra fees to get the things we want to improve our neighborhood; it appears that the fee increase is very minor, AND the improvements will happen. Good job, HOA board!