Specifically, he wants to know if Living With Your Plane has information on annual home owner fees charged airpark lot owners. Residents of Indian River currently pay $900 per year and Lars is concerned that is too low.

Following is a slide (click image for larger version) from the presentation Dave Sclair made at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh this past summer.

As you can see, there is a wide range of fees.

Post your comments or current examples below. Be sure to include the airpark on which you reside.

Homeowner fees

Read the entire article by clicking here (PDF download).

Banding together to work on common problems like zoning, noise, unhappy neighbors or other issues could work in your favor. If nothing more, you get additional individuals involved in trying to come up with ideas to enhance the fly-in community / residential airpark environment and lifestyle.

There are several airpark operations on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula that are considering organizing a regional association of fly-in communities or residential airparks for several reasons.

On offense, it might be a way to share promotion of airpark living in the region generally, supporting property values, etc. On defense, it might be a way to rally support (mutual aid) in case of airport opposition issues, etc.

If you’ve had any experience in this arena or if you are interested in learning more about the idea, share your thoughts and comments. If there’s sufficient interest, LWYP will be willing to help get airparks / fly-in community representatives together.

While not an attorney or schooled in legal matters, we have compiled many questions that have come to us via e-mail or at forums that we conduct at various aviation events such as Oshkosh, AOPA, Sun ‘n Fun and the like. Frequently the answers to the questions raised at these meetings are answered by someone in attendance at the gathering and very frequently that person is an attorney.

Remember, state laws often govern what an association operating where there are airport homes can and cannot do.

Here are some of the issues that we’ve compiled. More will be added in coming weeks and months. If you have a question, please let us hear about it and we’ll try to get an answer for you.

Question: How can association members get a special meeting called to address an issue?

Answer: This frequently is spelled out in the association declarations or covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&R). Some states have special regulations that state who or how special meetings can be called, in addition to the homeowner’s documents.

Question: Can an association board of directors fill a vacancy on the board by itself or must a special meeting and election be conducted?

Answer: Subject to the association documentation, many states allow a board of directors to fill association board vacancies without a special meeting or election. The association CC&Rs are the initial source of information for such a decision in most instances.

Question: Can a member of a homeowner’s association withhold an assessment if they are dissatisfied with the association or feel they have been treated unfairly?

Answer: Generally speaking, the answer is no. A homeowner association member can seek redress through the courts if appeals to the homeowner’s association board of directors fails, but as long as the assessment  (including special assessments) has been properly authorized by the board under the association’s rules and regulations, an owner cannot withhold payment of an assessment.

Failure to pay an assessment that has been properly enacted can result in the homeowner’s association pursuing legal action against the individual. The most frequent legal action is placing a lien on the property.

Question: Is there any sort of legal limitation on how much of an assessment an association board of directors can levy or how much of an increase it can establish?

Answer: Limitations to assessments whether new or adjusted are usually established in the Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&R) that have been made part of the establishment of the homeowner’s association and declarations made in the sub-division creation. Depending on how these documents are written, a board of directors might have certain restrictions to amounts or the manner in which they are approved.

Question: If a homeowner’s association provides certain utilities or services as part of the regular association fee, can these utilities or services be withheld if a regular or special assessment is not paid?

Answer: In some states there can be provisions for such actions. However, the declarations of the homeowner’s association must address such a situation before it probably can be enforced. Additionally, any such action probably will require certain notifications as set out by the association declarations as well as any state regulations.

In most instances, as long as the utility company has received payment for its services (the homeowner’s association pays a single fee for utilities for all properties) the utility most likely will not directly cut off the service. The homeowner’s association will most likely have to take the action itself.

Question: Must a homeowner’s association publicize its regular and special meetings?

Answer:Any homeowner’s board of directors is generally restricted to what it must do by its governing documents. Usually, closed meetings are authorized only to discuss specific items such as litigation or personal issues.

Question: Can a member of a homeowner’s association sue the association itself or the board of directors if they feel the board is acting improperly or unfairly?

Answer: Any member of a homeowner’s association usually can sue the board members personally or the association. The court will then determine if the actions being questioned are within the province of the board, if the actions taken have been done so negligently or in bad faith.

Board members have a fiduciary responsibility to the association and can be held liable if they breach this obligation by actions that are deemed dishonest. Courts generally will not second-guess the actions of the board in making business judgments providing the court determines that actions have been taken inn good faith and have been made within the scope of association documents authorizing such actions or activities.

• Homeowner fees are controversial, not a particular surprising;
• Raising homeowner fees isn’t something that’s done very often;
• The fee assessed by the vast majority of homeowner associations is quite low.

Here are the actual results of the survey together with some of the comments we received. Unless a person included their name and airpark with their remarks, we are keeping any identities confidential.

Our survey started off by asking the number of lots on the airpark. No airparks with less than 10 homesites were represented in the results. Responses from airparks with 10-25 lots and 26-35 lots were 21 percent each. The group of airparks with 36-50 homesites was cited 18 percent and those ranging from 51 to 65 accounted for 12 percent of the survey answers. The larger airparks – those with 65 or more lots – provided slightly more than 27 percent of the responses.

We think this mix of airpark sizes and the spread of responses makes the results pretty meaningful.
Of course, airparks with vacant lots don’t mean much so we asked respondents to advise us how many of their lots had been sold. The smallest airparks showed just under 25 percent of their sites had been sold. Airparks in the 10-25 category had 10 percent of lots sold. The figures for the other categories are:

• 26-35 – 21.2 percent sold
• 36-50 – 15 percent sold
• 51-65 – 6 percent sold
• Over 65 – 24.2 percent of lots had been sold.

Once more we had to qualify the results. Lots sold but without any homes showed a low level of activity and thus wouldn’t require a lot of association fees so we asked how many homes had been built on the various airparks.

About 42 percent of the lots on the smallest airparks had homes built on them, the survey revealed. Homes had been erected on 15 percent of the lots in airparks with 10-25 sites and 9 percent on the airparks with 26-35 home lots.

When we get to airparks with 36-50 lots, 12 percent of the lots have homes but only 6 percent are built out on those airparks in the 51-65 bracket. The airparks with more than 65 homesites had homes on 15 percent of the lots, according to responders to the survey.

Finally, with those items somewhat clarified we could get down to the actual fee assessed by the various homeowner associations.

The most common fee for homeowner associations was under $100 per month. Exactly 75 percent of all respondents reported this was the assessment at their airpark. Next highest was the $100-$250 per month fee and that was listed at 18/75 percent of the airparks. Only slightly more than 3 percent said their monthly fee was between $251 - $400 a month and the same percentage listed a fee of $401-$500 per month. No association reported a homeowner fee of more than $500 per month.

More than 75 percent (77.4%) of the survey respondents said their association ahd adjusted homeowner fees in the last three years. The fee had last been raised more than 5 years ago at 19 percent of the airparks and the adjustments had been made 4-5 years ago at only 3 percent.

Survey respondents came from most states with Florida accounting for nearly 22 percent of the responses. Texas provided 12.5 percent of the survey answers with Alaska, Arizona, Illinois and South Carolina each supplying 6.25 percent of the answers.

The survey obviously doesn’t answer all the questions but it should provide some insight for those airparks wrestling with the fee question and offering some guidelines.

Here are some of the comments:

A responder from an airpark with more than 65 homesites indicated they have a fee of $180 per year for homeowners plus $55 for runway use. This response didn’t indicate whether all property owners – those with and those without planes – had to pay the total of $235 per month.

“Our fee is very minimal - $500 per year – to cover maintenance, grass cutting and a reserve for future repaving,” reported someone from a 26-35 lot airpark.

An airpark in South Carolina with more than 65 lots has a homeowners fee of under $100 a month.

A respondent in the upper Midwest with more than 65 homesite on the airpark said they have over 3,000 people in the association, assess under $100 per month and it includes golf course and lake maintenance fees.

A Texas respondent said their association’s fees of $100 per month are “too low to do proper maintenance and capital improvements. Some homeowners are resistant to any increases.” That airpark falls in the 26-35 class with 10-25 of the lots built on.

In Florida, an airpark with 51-65 lots has a $200 per year fee for homeowners. “An additional airport use fee is charged to all active aircraft owners using the runway. The fee is currently $500 per year.” The survey shows the fee was last adjusted in the previous three years.

A new Texas airpark – now in its second year – has 26-35 home lots with less than 10 homes finished although all the lots were sold within a year. The homeowner fee is $340 per year.

Disputes on fees and other things aren’t uncommon for residential airpark associations, just as they are common for other neighborhood associations. A Florida airpark with more than 65 lots, all sold and all with homes, has a fee of under $100 per month, according to the individual completing the survey. This individual says “the fee in 1997 was $25. It nearly tripled by 2006 mainly as a result of a determined clique who took over the board of directors and spent wildly and foolishly (and possibly illegally) resulting in serious debt obligations now being paid down by the present membership.”

The owner of Willow Valley Landing Strip in Mohave Valley, Arizona reported that “our small sub-division has a 2,585 foot landing strip. All flight-oriented members are invited to use the strip without charge; occasional users chip in to improve it. I own it and we make out pretty well without help to keep it operational.”

In the article where HOA’s and CC&R’s can be used to protect ones property and property rights, however in both aviation and non-aviation related communities, the HOA’s are creating more problems that they are solving.

I am in the process of selling my dream home because of the actions of a few who managed to make living there unbearable.

I planned this house since the 60’s while in college: A private area, with a runway, and located in one of the most beautiful spots in the Northwest. After a long military career and retirement, we spent a great deal of our life-savings in buying and building. I made sure that we met all the codes, CC&R’s, whatever, just to insure we bothered nobody. The airpark is very sparsely populated most of the year.

What happened is just what Dave described in his article. A small group that wanted things their way took over the Board. Enforcement of the CC&R’s became a matter of who you were vs. what the rules were. Significant violations of State Code were common. Large unnecessary projects were approved, expenses soared, questionable financial dealings arose, malicious vandalism appeared, threats were made. The place was turning from a quiet paradise to the “big city” environment that the part-timer residents migrated from on the weekends. The atmosphere became unbearable.

Who do we have to blame? Most people who own on an airpark for just a weekend, or summertime residence are “comfortable” economically. What this allows them to be is apathetic towards the business of maintaining the community, particularly if the population is primarily “part-time.” They tend to “not want to get involved” and therefore the membership of the Board goes to those who are looking for the power they cannot get elsewhere. The same apathy allows HOA Boards to pick and choose how the business is run. The general membership was/is too lazy to look into the day-to-day operations. The secret is to keep the assessments in a range that is not too high so the individual budget bottom line looks good. Make the annual increases in assessment fairly small. My assessments doubled in the six years we spent in the development. The only thing that kept going up was the caretaker’s wages and benefits. Multiply the assessment by 100+ and you will see that even a small increase will give the Board plenty of extra change for new projects.

I tried my hand at being on the Board, but after a year of battling, being lied to on a continuing basis by other members of the Board, and being totally ineffective in reasoning with the other members, I decided my best course was to work outside the Board.

What I found was that “apathy was running rampant”. Unable to stir the “middle of the road” group, I decided to sell. The alternative is to sue. That is too expensive as well as being a long drawn out process that depends on the whims of a judge. It doesn’t help when the president of the HOA of the airpark is a non-flying lawyer. My hope is in the saying “what goes around, comes around” and that when the expenses of living (even part-time) in the community exceed those of living in a large city, people will start to take note and question in earnest. It is a shame that the power needs of a few can ruin even paradise.

Mark Smith
Lincoln, CA

Do you fly a prop-jet or a full jet aircraft? Are you the builder of an experimental plane? How about owning and operating an ultralight machine? Are you a helicopter enthusiast?

Most people buy into an airpark without giving any thought to aircraft other than single and multi-engine prop planes of the most popular type – the Cessna, Piper, and Beech.

After getting into their home and bring their ultralight airplane or helicopter in for the first time, they suddenly start getting negative reactions from neighbors.

That’s when someone starts looking closely at the covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&Rs) to see how the helicopter or ultralight or jet can be restricted from operating at the airpark.

Unfortunately, it is rare that the CC&Rs get into the finer points of the types or aircraft that can and cannot be operated on the field. When such a situation arises, there are usually homeowner association meetings filled with anger and disappointment. Friendships are shattered and families sometimes find disagreements within their own.

How can it be resolved?

If there is nothing in the CC&Rs related to the types of aircraft that can be operated from the field, there is nothing that can be done against the operator, in most cases. It is possible that local noise ordinances might be brought into play, but that, again is unusual

The moral of the story is that the CC&Rs must be examined closely when you are considering a purchase to make sure they contain all the elements that you consider important for your way of life.

Even when the majority of the board or the action of the entire homeowners’ association was in conflict with what this one individual wanted, he seemed to always get his way and unless that person favored the action nothing was done (or, things were done that others were opposed to.

What can I do about this sort of situation, he inquired?

He indicated that the association rules were pretty clear on the issues and the dominating individual didn’t have the right to do the things he was doing.

Our response wasn’t exactly what this individual really wanted to hear.

The first step, we advised, was for the concerned property owner to try and sit down with the offending individual and the board of directors and discuss the concerns and the issues in a pleasant atmosphere. See if the issues can be clarified and attempt to work them out amicably, we suggested.

If that step doesn’t work, the next course of action of to get others in the association who feel the same way and hire a mediator to see if the problem can be resolved in that manner. Often the issues are simply misunderstandings among the parties and pent-up frustrations block the normally cooperative individuals from seeing the other point of view. A trained mediator can usually work through the issues without any animosity arising the resolve the problems.

If that isn’t the case in your airpark, there are just a few ways to turn from there. One, you can mount a political campaign to get the board member out and insist that the supportive property owners stand firm.
Another approach is to simply ignore the individual and the problem, although that hardly seems the way to turn if actions contrary to what the majority wants are taking place.

Of course, you can sell your property and move away; obviously not the course of action most people want or will take.

Lastly, comes legal action. Frankly, we discourage that course of action because it is costly to everyone, it takes a tremendous amount of time and in most situations it doesn’t really seem to work.