Las Vistas Blog - June, 2016

Hello Fellow Bloggers

Rain, rain, and more rain are words you hear every day in south Florida as we are really heating up and having rainstorms daily. We expect this weather, but the heat has been really on us with temperatures in the low 90’s this early in the summer season.

On a hot and steamy Saturday, I wrote this blog as I sat in our air conditioned clubhouse welcoming residents who wish to secure their car decals. We began issuing decals on June 1st, and, in addition to regular office hours, offered two opportunities, an evening and a Saturday, for residents to receive their decals. To date, we have issued approximately 150 decals, and will continue to issue them hereon in. We want to thank those volunteers who helped up issue the decals including Gene Palazzo, Gloria Orlando, Mary Bradley, and of course our staff.

For the next part of our security project, we have arranged with our security firm to begin, on July 1st, to look at the cars parked in guest spots that don’t have our guest passes. We have issued over a dozen guest passes to date, and our goal is to identify any car not showing a guest pass or our parking decal (some unit owners who own a second car are appropriately using guest spots and have a parking decal). Violation notices will be placed on cars without either pass or decal, and we will be tracking with security the length of time these cars remain on our property with no identification, for possible fining or towing. We also have lists of unit owners who notified us that they are not here and we will have security bypass those cars, as well as the covered cars on the property for the time being.

We want to assure everyone that we know and anticipate that it will take some time yet to allow all residents an opportunity to secure their parking decals, and that is why we are beginning with the violation notices with guest spots only. We will hold off on the next phase of the security project until everyone has had a reasonable opportunity to secure a parking decal.

By now you all should know that all of our amendments and the proposition for a material change to a common element have been passed by both the unit owners and the Board of Directors (at the special June 6th meeting). These amendments and the material change will be recorded with the county clerk’s office shortly. We want to express our appreciation and applaud the nearly 250 unit owners who participated in this process.

Since my last report on our sale and rental activity, we approved at the June Board Meeting the sale of a 2 bedroom/2bath unit in the A building for $52,000 and two annual rentals – both in the F building in units 203 and 209.

On our grounds, our landscapers have been busy here at Las Vistas and have begun the trimming of the soft wood trees (sea grapes and chifferellas), and that should be completed within the next few days. A silver lining in our weather is that the rain has really helped with our new planting, especially as we have placed new sod down and fertilized everywhere.

In my previous communications, I have mentioned that we lost a tree during a really bad storm a couple of months ago, and we now have an excavation site open behind the P building due to a problem caused by a pipe that was damaged during the chipping of the stump of that tree. It appears that the pressure of repairing the pipe caused the main waste pipe to shift toward the building instead of away from the building and this has to be repaired. The insurance company of the chipping company sent an adjuster to come and investigate the claim, and we expect to be able to have the repair done and the site restored within the next week or so.

Our maintenance staff is continuing our project with painting the laundry rooms in all the buildings that have them and they have completed buildings F, H and G. We will be moving on with the project, one building at a time. Once again, the garbage chutes in all our buildings had to be cleaned and sanitized after a buildup that occurred because of the Memorial Day holiday, when we had to wait several extra days for a garbage pickup. Most likely we will have to repeat this after the 4th of July which also occurs this year on a Monday.

We have several projects taking place including cleaning the pool pump rooms, cleaning out storage rooms and removing old paint cans, etc., systematically identifying and replacing all types of light bulbs, and evaluating which storage room, meter room and pool restroom doors that have to be replaced, etc. We have ordered the supplies that Pierre will need to maintain the chemical balances for the pool, which he will be doing as of July 1st, and he will be coordinating with our maintenance staff the general clean up and skimming of the pools.

Unfortunately our duck problem persists, but we did have to caution two unit owners, one in the P building and one in H to stop feeding the ducks. I encourage unit owners who see this behavior to feel free to report it to the office and we will contact the unit owner accordingly.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, we had to order special road markers that the fire department requires and we ordered them, received them and 5 of them have been installed around our property. They are the little blue square reflectors you see throughout the parking lots and roadways.

We have installed bulletin cork boards with pushpins over the mailboxes in every building to accommodate all of the activity flyers and just want to remind folks that only flyers approved by the Association may be posted there.

I will shortly be sending out The Voice Newsletter, which is at the printer and the summer edition is filled with pictures of our unit owners at BBQ’s, bingo games, the pool tournament and our visit by a choir.

Speaking of social activities, the summer is providing lots of activities for our residents. We had a really nice turn out for our Memorial Day BBQ and over 40 people enjoyed burgers, hotdogs, and all that goes with it. The Social Society has planned a 4th of July BBQ, an afternoon game party, a Las Vistas Bingo game, a ladies luncheon, and several line dancing sessions. Thanks for their hard work in keeping us all entertained.

I thought I would share with you a milestone for one of our unit owners, Harold Campbell, who celebrated his 99th birthday a few weeks ago and received a proclamation from Commissioner Thurston of the Lauderhill City Hall. A group of his friends and our unit owners celebrated this great occasion at the Golden Corral restaurant and we have a collage of pictures in the lobby in remembrance of his 99th. We believe that Harold is our most senior resident at Las Vistas. Congratulations Harold!

Several unit owners who don’t have computers and can’t read my blog either through e-mail or on our website have expressed an interest in it and asked that I provide printed copies, much like we do with the newsletter. I will work on a format to reproduce the blog in-house and have copies provided on our newspaper/magazine racks in the Clubhouse lobby for anyone interested in see it.

And, as I close this edition of the Las Vistas Blog, I would like to remind everyone that there will be no July or August Board Meetings, now that our amendments have passed and are being filed with the county clerk. Of course, if needed, we can call a special meeting to address any time-sensitive issues. I will continue with this blog nonetheless during the summer and on this note, I end this blog with my usual wish that the sun shines every day for all of us.