Letter from the President
3/24/04 : Automatic Fee Increases?

Many of you are concerned by the language of your County issued Fee Increase Election Ballots in regard to implied automatic fee increases.To my knowledge this was the first mention of automatic annual fee increases tied to the Consumer Price Index conveyed to any Officer or Member of Lomond Terrace Road Assoc.

I checked in with our liason at the County "Nancy Hoffman" and she explained that the Consumer Price Index increase is an option that we can Exercise or Not.If we want to exercise the option of an automatic fee increase tied to the CPI we can only do so with a yes vote by a quorum at a regular meeting of our association. No action taken by us. NO AUTOMATIC FEE INCREASE.

One reason they give us this option is that in the future every time we decide to raise fees we will have to call another election and pay the county $800.00 for the privilege of charging ourselves additional fees. This year the CPI is approx.+1.5% It has been about 15 years since we last raised fees. At that rate we would have had a total increase of +22.5% for that period. The current one time increase we are voting on would be a +25% increase in the same period.I don't know which of the two methods would collect more money over the long haul.

There are a couple of CSA's that have opted for automatic increases...most have not.
I also did some research into the genesis of this whole bureaucratic procedure and it seems to stem from the passsage of Prop 13 many years ago leading to Prop.218 in 1996 and the requirement that property owners get to vote on property based governmental fee increases and or tie them to a stable index to avoid wildly fluctuating assesments.

Thanks for Listening

Michael Saunders
President LTRA