Fee Structure

As it stands, landowners pay an annual fee and then hope something will happen to their benefit.

There is a dirty little secret about Forbes Park. Several thousand landowners are subsidizing services for a small fraction. What if every lot had a house on it? The expectation would be that the roads would be in good condition and snow removal would be robust for everybody. This would cost considerably more. Where would the funds come from? Higher annual fees?

I tallied the cost of roads from the 2023 FPLOA P&L:

Roads Maintenance Expense $64,395

Roads Equipment Expense $196,102

Roads Payroll Expense $144,409

Total Roads Expense $404,906 48% Of Operating Expense

Depreciation $95,323

Total $500,229 53% Of Total Expense

Total Operating Expense $840,882

Total Expense $937,925

Around half of the annual FPLOA annual expense is road expense. Note that there is no allocation for road grading versus snow removal. We don’t really have any idea how much is spent on Forbes Park Road or on snowplowing or on Emery. We do know that not every road is graded and not every road has snow removal. It is obfuscated. The road in front of my property has no indication that it has been graded in recent times.

What if road costs were allocated based on beneficiaries of such cost?

The best solution to this, in my opinion, is reduce the annual fees, and utilize a fee-for-service structure. One of the most obvious solutions for the roads is to convert Forbes Park Road into a toll road.

Or another example is the fees that are associated with construction of a new home. Hoping that the ECC will have enough staff to review your drawings and do progress inspections is simply too risky when one has that much capital at risk.

Simply paying a third party to review the drawings for a fee provides a simple solution. Paying for inspections, such as a footing inspection using a third party is a much better solution.

Similarly, if one is using the dump station, a small fee could be used to cover the capital costs and the maintenance costs.

This could also be extended to using the showers at the community center.

This approach then becomes a segue into a separate issue which would be utilizing vendors to provide services. There are a multitude of serves that vendors could provide such as no-tax diesel for equipment, laundry services, delivery services, shuttle services, aggregate, on-site equipment rental.

I believe that we could convince the owners of the 3,348 lots in the park that this system would work, especially if their annual dues were reduced considerably.

I think another landowner agrees: “The HOA charges should be on a graduated scale depending on improvements... sort of like the property tax scale. The more improvements put on a lot- the more road usage ( such as construction traffic ) It seems ridiculous that a year round resident pays the same amount as a property owner that has no improvements and very restricted permission to use their lot from the county &/or the FP HOA rules. How to get a conversation with both ???? ”

Amen.