Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: replacement reserves

[Howard Landman (howard]

> On 4/6/04 7:25 PM, "don i arkin" <shardon5 [at] juno.com> wrote:
>> We did not budget for items that would last at least 30 years
>> from the date of the study.

and Sharon replied:
> What???? Meaning the place will fall down by then? Is this short term
> thinking or what? Surely this is a mistake?

River Rock did the same.  Forcing people to pay reserves for replacing
their unit completely is equivalent to making them pay for their unit
twice over.  Not many people can afford to buy two equal-price houses
and only live in one of them.

Besides, we estimate that our units will last around 100 years.  That's
beyond our planning horizon of 30 years.  70 years from now, some other
finance committee will meet to debate this issue.  They'll have better,
more accurate, more up-to-date information than we do now.

The most complicated thing in our reserve accounts is the parking lot
maintenance.  There are several different levels of treatment, from
"crack seal" to "rip up and repave", with different periods like "once
every 3 years" or "once every 20 years".  But clearly, you don't need
to do a little one in the same year as you do a bigger one.  Getting
the schedule right took us 3 years.  :-)  Fortunately we had been
over-reserving up till then - especially as we still don't see a need
to do the first crack seal yet.

Biggest issue this year is "How do we actually spend money out of the
reserves?".  We have a few things that need fixing, but realized that
there we had no agency lower than the HOA board that was authorized to
spend reserve funds.  Probably we'll authorize the maintenance committee
and the common house committee, but it's still somewhat in a state of
confusion.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, Colorado
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