Letter to the Editor - December 10, 2015

Reader disagrees with DICA 2016 Annual Dues and Special Assessment

The 2015 DICA annual meeting had 141 homeowners in attendance. This should concern our community’s leaders to ask themselves why this occurs, and not misinterpret it as support for their decisions. The Covenants and Restrictions (C & R) document is a chief cause for low attendance on Daniel Island because it thwarts dialogue to occur for major decisions like the annual budget and special assessments.

It is a wake-up call for homeowners when you see a continuous escalating trend in annual dues, and the first ever special assessment levied for Daniel Island that is a litmus test for greater to come in the future. We were primed to accept that $1,875 annual dues are an industry average for a community, and I believe that we are on track for it.

The DICA’s annual budget and special assessment can be challenged by the homeowners. However, it requires a minimum of 67%, or about 1,200 homeowners (one vote per address) to voice an objection within ten days’ notice of a document release date.

We should ask the Board of Directors through Jane Baker’s office to change that by amendment of our Covenants and Restrictions. The DIPOA and the Daniel Island News could be a more effective forum of communication for our residents if more time can be offered to inform homeowners of pending leadership decisions that are legally debatable, but thwarted by a C & R currently biased for the developer’s advantage. In the interim, I encourage the public to voice their support or not of these matters as our dues have not been collected or spent for 2016 yet. These decisions can be improved.

Great leadership should aspire to cultivate greater homeowner involvement in major decision making for its community. Our community should be fashioned by the whole, and not by a select few.

DICA collects a percentage fee called a “community enhancement fee” from every real estate transaction to exclusively fund a community service organization (DICF) that could otherwise be used to stabilize annual dues, avoid special assessments, and even improve the quality of life. However, DICF largely serves philanthropic objectives over tangible community enhancements that would clearly be more typical and appropriate business for a community association to involve itself. It is possible that the DICF could be modified or eliminated from the C & R by amendment, and Daniel Island could be an even greater place to live.

Should a community association really be in the business of determining who and where to send philanthropic donations, or should it? The Board of Directors makes the decision of where to allocate these contributions at its sole discretion. Funding has been significantly guided toward adjacent communities and people that in many cases have already been well covered by other private and professional donor organizations. It is inappropriate to call it a “community enhancement fee” when it overlooks the community it derives these revenues.

It is further inappropriate to then ask homeowners to pay for a special assessment to enhance our community for questionable erosion control projects that could be funded by this community enhancement fee or make sacrifices in other areas rather than stretch homeowner budgets like the national debt. Homeowners should be more informed about large capital expenses that have not been budgeted in advance, and given the opportunity to voice whether we feel it is worthy of consideration for our community to reach into their pockets for a special assessment contribution or withdrawn from our annual dues (i.e. two expensive highway signs). The erosion control projects slated for homeowners to pay a special assessment as a one-time expenditure for a major capital expense of a non-recurring nature is actually a fiscally appropriate qualifier for withdrawing from the Reserve Fund that the Board of Directors has chosen to leave fully funded. I think there are plenty of Daniel Island homeowners like myself that live in a different world than our Board of Directors. Living on Daniel Island is a great, but it can be much better.

Jeff Johnson