October 11, 2022

Sierra Los Pinos Property Owners’ Association
Board of Directors Meeting
October 11th 2022, 6:51pm via Zoom

The meeting was called to order by the acting president Keith Rigney, with the following members present: Keith Rigney, Scott DeWitt, Suzanne Star, Kristi Cross, Amber Gaston DeWitt, Mana Babicz, Ann Cooke, John Hines and David Stuedell. Josh Toennis was in a late meeting but said he would try to get on the call later.

Guests: Lee Taylor, Mary Moore

Approval of minutes: Suzanne Star moved to approve the minutes of the September meeting, seconded by Scott DeWitt and, there being no opposition, motion carried.

Lee Taylor, La Cueva Fire Department fire chief, joined us at the beginning of the meeting to discuss the topic of 2 water tanks that will be used for fire suppression. The conversation happened prior to the meeting being called to order.

Lee: Anyways, I would just like to make sure that the whole board is committed to this water tank project because we are pretty soon going to be moving those tanks to Sierra los Pinos and if we don’t have full commitment, I don’t want to incur that cost.

David: What is that cost?

Lee: To Sierra Los Pinos, it’s zero cost. We’ve obtained the grant for the transport of the tanks, that’s the initial cost. Later on when we stand the tanks up and plum them so that we can access the water stored in the tanks, of course that’s additional cost there. As I mentioned to Keith over the weekend, if we can work on that part of it cooperatively between the HOA and the fire department, that would be wonderful, but if not, we will proceed with using La Cueva fire department funds, county general funds, grants, whatever we have to.

Keith: Yeah, we were definitely going to discuss that because this is a whole new board and I don’t think they entirely know what these tanks are, where they’re from, what they’re for, where they’re going and all things like that. So we’ll lay that out in this meeting and I can summarize it for you after.
I think the one thing we really do need to nail down that I’ve heard a lot of miscommunication on, and mainly miscommunication comes from previous members of the board... but the current interpretation is that these tanks will not be able to be filled from our water system directly. The current talk is they will be drafted from Las Conchas and then poured in the tank. Is that what you’ve been hearing on your end as well?

Lee: Thank you for letting me join tonight because that’s one of the points I wanted to clarify. When we started these discussions early on with John Hines and Paul Lisko, the plan was to fill the tanks of the Sierra Los Pinos domestic water system. That would still be ideal if that’s possible. The problem is we can’t dedicate fire suppression water and it be comingled with domestic use system. So there would have to be a check valve basically isolating the tanks from the domestic use system. But again, I don’t want that to stop this project in any way at all. If that’s something the board does not want, that connection made to these tanks, I just need to know upfront and we will plan accordingly.

Keith: Perfect. And that is also why I wanted to bring that up, I want to get this nailed down, I see this as a huge obstacle that needs to get nailed down further. I know talks with our management team, the talks were to not connect the tanks to our system by any piping whatsoever. The other avenue to compensate that, because we do see this as beneficial, and we do want to help, is in those MOUs we have drafted a policy where you can pull 10,000 gallons out of our system daily with guidance from our water operator from any one of our hydrants. There’s a hydrant not far from those towers. So the other option would be you could pull 10,000 gallons a day from our system, 5 day lengths, and you could have the tanks full. And if you ever use that water, you could refill it from our system. It keeps the, as you said earlier, it keeps the potable clean water as far away from fire use water as possible. I don’t know how you feel about that but that was just an idea that was thrown around.

Lee: Yeah, we’ll agree to what the board is agreeing to. Just so you all know, to fill two 25,000 gallon tanks with trucks from the water is a long process. That’s what we’re trying to avoid in this situation if possible.

Keith: And then filling from hydrants, would that make it any better at all on your guys’ side?

Lee: Maybe a little bit, reduce the travel time to the river versus to the hydrant.

Keith: Perfect, and I want to help you guys as much as possible as you’re helping us with getting these tanks set up here. So we’ll definitely be in talks about it, the board can discuss this, and while we’re discussing this I would like to have your feedback and input. A lot of this I would have to heavily lean on John Hines and parts of the water management team to iron these out. But I do think John Hines would be our best advocate. If we can connect the tanks, if there’s a certain way we can connect to it, that keeps our systems safe; whether it’s a check valve, whether it’s an air gap at the top, I don’t know what that is or what that would look like but I would like to entertain as many options as we can and help you guys out for helping us.

Lee: Sure, and that’s why I want to work together with you guys, you and the board. We do have time, like I said we’re going to move the tanks fairly soon. But as far as design, standing the tanks up and getting them plumbed, that’s going to be a while yet still. I want to make sure everyone is in agreement the way the system is designed.

Keith: And the cost for the tanks getting moved up here through the grant money – will that money be coming through our association or directly through you and La Cueva?

Lee: The fiscal agent for that grant is going to be the Jemez Mountain Firewise association. I’m not sure why that non-profit is being used but in any case it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a fact that we’re getting this total of $20,000 for this specific project and Jemez Mountain Firewise will be the fiscal agent.

Keith: Cool, I just wanted to make sure that if we needed to watch out for some budget headed our way, I just wanted to make sure we were aware.

Lee: Gotcha.

Suzanne: Can you tell me how long it’s going to take to get those tanks up and running?

Lee: I can’t say definitely but my hopes would be that they would be standing and full of water before the next fire season.

Suzanne: Okay, the only reason why I’m asking is because the last time you talked to us you made a comment about the fact it took you 5 years to get the tanks up and running at La Cueva and you thought you could expedite this and maybe be 3 years. You think it could actually be in a year or so?

Lee: Yes, that’s my hope.

Suzanne: Ok, in the meantime, where are you guys going to store these tanks?

Lee: We plan to store them just east of the fire station, in the playground area.
Did you hear that?

Suzanne: Yes, I did. I don’t have any comments on that, sorry.

Lee: I think that’s still the plan, correct, Keith?

Keith: Yeah, I knew they were going to be stored somewhere down there. I figured that was kind of the only viable spot in my mind regardless with snow coming soon and having to plow, and having the trucks out, whatever it may be, so I did figure that was the only viable spot.

Scott: We’re going to need large equipment to unload this and I guess if we put it in a temporary location we’re going to need to bring equipment back up to place them in their final resting place.

Lee: Yes, sir.

Scott: Does the grant cover that second part or is that something we’re going to have to come up with?

Lee: The initial grant doesn’t cover that although the grant is $20,000, the cost of transport and unloading is around $14,000 so we’ll have a little bit of leftover for the other part of it. But that’s a drop in the bucket for what will be needed as far as design, engineering and implementation.

Scott: Ok, that’s all I had.

Lee: Ok. What Keith was talking about earlier, let me just let the new board members know. These tanks are 36ft tall, 10ft in diameter and it’s a quantity of 2 tanks. The plan is to stand them up on fire station property just south of the current fire station. So up on the hill, south of the fire station is the plan. And it would be gravity feet with head pressure from the tanks to the fire apparatus as needed.

Keith: And I believe, for everyone’s awareness, since the La Cueva property is within this plot map, we kind of have a say on where these tanks go. Unfortunately, we’ll be forced to do an architectural control form, it’ll be sent it to our architectural committee, that’ll get approved... we’ll see all this all ahead of time once this gets designed and placed. I don’t see an issue of it not getting approved, that is just one more hoop we’ll have to jump through according to our bylaws and covenants and all that fun stuff.

Lee: And the reason why that site was picked; 1) it’s fire department property, 2) the elevation difference so that we don’t want to incur the cost of high dollar pump to move that water – we can just use the gravity and the head pressure.

Keith: That’s great, Lee. I think this is hugely beneficial to the community at 50,000 gallons of standing water for fires. As we all know, we just went through a fire. We’ll be in close contact with you. If you need anything from us, please let us know. And we can hopefully get this moving forward. I will send an email to you after this meeting of the general consensus of the board, whether it’s approved or not, formally approved by the board and we’ll move forward with that.

Lee: Ok, I appreciate it. Also, just so you all know; this will be 50,000 gallons of water dedicated to the fire suppression. We cooperate with several other agencies as far as suppressing fires, not just in this fire district but Santa Fe National Forest, Valles Caldera... I have agreements with all these other agencies that if they need access to our stored fire suppression water, that they have access to it as well. I think it’s the right thing to do, being a good neighbor, and it helps us all out if other agencies can access this water as well.

Ann: I think that’s a great plan, Lee.

Lee: Another thing I’ll just mention really quick; there’s been some communication from your former president. I’ll ask you all: any communication between your board and the fire department regarding these things go through me, regarding any communication, please.

Keith: Roger that, Lee, you can count on us to do that, for sure.

Lee: Ok, I appreciate it. I can answer any questions if anybody has right now, or if it’s okay, I’ll just drop off.

Ann: Lee, I very much appreciate all your time.

Lee: You’re welcome, Ann.

Keith: Yeah, thank you for joining, Lee. Thank you for helping on all this, getting this all set up. I’m excited and we’ll be in touch.

Lee: Let me just say one more thing. It’s been said since the very beginning of talks about pre-tanks from Intel, about the possibility of the homeowners’ property insurance decreasing as a result of these tanks being in place. Some people have construed that as being a guarantee. It’s not a guarantee but it’s highly likely that we would be able to have insurance rates reduced with these tanks in the close vicinity. It’s not a guarantee though, I just want to make sure everyone is clear on that.

Ann: Thank you, Lee, for that comment, and I would be happy to expand on it during my time later on, if people have questions about that.

Lee: Ok, sounds good. I will let you continue on with your meeting. Thank you for letting me join in.

Keith: Thanks, Lee, thank you for your time, we’ll be in touch.
I did record that; I did not start this meeting officially. But it is recorded and we’ll get it in minutes and we will proceed.

OFFICER REPORTS

President (Keith Rigney)

1. Cerro Pelado funding reimbursement
I have not heard anything back from Theresa for any reimbursement, for anything we’ve spent on the fix on the Aspen Grove. This could be partially on my end because I’ve been busy. For everyone’s awareness, I got Covid. I was back for a long week at work and then I went on personal vacation. So I will be creating an action item to catch up with Theresa.
Another thing too, I want to make sure...I have a lot of stuff on my plate it seems and I don’t know if anyone else has availability to go after this funding. It is a roads ordeal so initially I thought David Stuedell should start looking for funding but I don’t want to just shove something on his plate. So if anyone has available time to look into this, that would be fantastic; any help would be appreciated I should say.

Suzanne: Was there a Kris Chavez up here with USDA to investigate the flooding, does anybody know?

Keith: That name doesn’t sound familiar to me, unless I completely spaced it. But I did have a meeting with Theresa Greeno, Lee Taylor, the state engineer and a couple of other folks initially when this flooding was really, really bad, that name does not sound familiar from that group.

Suzanne: Somebody mentioned to me that she was up here and I’ve got a call into her to see if she was up here. But somebody told me, I can’t remember who it was anymore. But she was up here and she investigated this and I was wondering if anyone had been notified because I didn’t hear anything about it.
On the second note I just wanted to let you know that I requested into the governor’s office and the only thing that I got back so far is that they were checking with an agency that may be able to help us but I don’t have any great hopes for that and I haven’t heard back from them yet. So I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

Keith: Perfect. And my wife was also reaching out to the state representative as well, to try and get some help whether it’s funding or information on what’s caused the fire or whatever may be. Since then they’ve been playing phone tag and it kind of just fizzled out. So we’ll have to reignite some of these fires and see if we can get anything moving forward again. It’s definitely not fixed down there, it still needs more improvements. It probably won’t be done this year, maybe next year, depending on how the board sees fit, but this cost is not going away at this time. And it is $36,000 that was approved and done so far.

2. In-person meeting
I know we’re all busy and I say this every single time but I would like if we start getting some real action items that need to be discussed and/or done, I would like to go to in person. I know it’s not ideal, I know this zoom is wonderful, sitting in your own house, being able to eat dinner, being able to get home a minute before the meeting starts, but I would still like to bring up potential board meeting going back to in-person that it’s not set up yet. But we’ll keep beating that dead horse for a while until we figure it out and really start get things lined up.

3. There were 2 potential lawsuits against Sierra Los Pinos property association that kind of came out of the woodwork this last month. This is where all my time has been as I figured this is the biggest item, biggest issue we have. So I’ll kind of summarize these and their status, and where we’re going forward with this.
There are 5 lots for sale up on Highroad within unit 6. These lots have been for sale for I don’t even know how long, probably 5 to 10 years. They almost sold last year to a potential buyer that didn’t agree with our road maintenance agreement; he backed out because of it. That same buyer is now back and he’s trying to buy the lots once again. But the current owners, the Jemez Mountain Development, have told our attorney Scott Turner, that if this sale falls through due to the road maintenance agreement or due to any board involvement, that they will take legal action against us. So with that being said, the homeowner had the ability to kind of wish for whatever he wanted because if he backed out of the sale, it would not be his money at risk; it would be the current owners at risk and our money at risk. To avoid this, I spent many hours on the phone with Scott Turner to try and get this resolved. We did set up an emergency meeting which Mana will talk about later, about those minutes, and the board came to a conclusion that we will not have any assessments against the owners of those 5 lots and that we don’t have to maintain the High Road. We did try to initially get the assessments on them because they are driving 90% of Los Griegos and that is more roads than 95% of our population. But they didn’t like that and he asked for the world. So to avoid any conflict we bent the knee a little bit. But within this legal agreement it is also included that SLP will never supply water to these lots which I think is a huge win on our part, that’s a personal opinion. But this agreement was signed by me, it was notarized in Los Alamos and mailed off in Jemez Springs. I have another action item to touch base with Scott Turner and see if he received that official notary copy. If not, I do have a copy and I don’t mind making another. But of the email streams I have seen, the potential buyer and the opposing attorney agreed to the document and we should be in the clear. We will have a potential new development up there but that is something we will have to catch later on. But other than that, no assessments, we don’t maintenance the High Road. Any questions, concerns, anything people want to know before I move on to the next one?

Ann Cooke: Thank you so much for your time and effort, I think you did a great job.

Keith: Thank you, I must say it was not fun to get an email that Scott Turner was going to drop us if we don’t reply to them that day. It turned out to be very frantic but I can’t thank the board enough to be flexible, attending the meetings, helping us decide on an option and extensively reading documents to help me decide best path forward. So I can’t thank you enough for helping me.

And then this next one... I went through some email chains with a non-member about some maintenance on the road on Ashley Lane. These emails got very nasty, very crude, very gross. Even when I was just a helping hand, trying to do better, trying to make everything go forward and go away, it just kept rolling out of proportion. I was fortunate enough to have Suzanne Star call this individual and help, so I really want to thank Suzanne for helping me in this situation because it wasn’t fun. I had nothing to do with any of this, I was literally here just to help, and that guy didn’t care in the slightest. So thank you, Suzanne.
But the basis of it is, the board went through a lawsuit back in 2008 about Ashley Lane. The main premise of this is within those legal documents that came out of the lawsuit, SLP doesn’t have the ability to modify Ashley Lane which I didn’t know about and I don’t know if David knew about that, but there are legal binding documents that hold us to keeping that. I have huge concerns with this because if I was here back then, that document wouldn’t had been signed or it would be a plea agreement but there is no way to snow plow, “blade” or maintenance a road without modifying it. It’s an impossible task and this individual is wanting us to “return Ashley Lane back to its state from 2008”. It has come to my attention that no pictures were taken of 2008 so going back to that state is impossible. And once again, every year we blade it, so since 2008 we have modified that road, snow plow has modified that road. David Stuedell did meet with a contractor, he can touch base on that later, to kind of look at that area. I know Suzanne was in talks with him too, if you want to add anything. But as of right now, the path forward is to step lightly and hopefully do whatever we can to not modify Ashley Lane.

Suzanne: Ashley Lane mediation came about because we wanted SLPPOA to have access to the national forest. And we did get our access through private land to the national forest by Ashley Lane but one of the provisions had to be that Ashley Lane couldn’t be modified, and it was modified a bit. And just to let you know right now, I think the only thing that’s really important in this situation, and I’ve been in contact with Hotchkiss, is that as long as we keep in contact with him and we kind of give him an idea that we’re working with him, and that we understand what’s going on and that’s a communication issue, that he’s fine with it. So far I’ve had no other problems with him, and I talk to him almost every couple of days. So far we’re okay. And if we can get Pete up to help mitigate some of that run of, we may be okay. He might just back off and just let it be. So I’ll keep working with him, and working with Dave on the roads and see if we can get that resolved.
I wanted to add another thing. Because we do have that mediation, it would be wise if we put a summary in the newcomer package, because Ashley Lane was mediated, so all the SLPPOA residents could have access over that private land to the forest if they wanted it. Not many people use it but they do. Under the circumstances, I think that should really be put into the newcomer package because it also says that anybody that also uses that road, it’s only for SLPPOA members, it’s not for people from Albuquerque or Santa Fe but guests can come, they need to make sure they don’t damage the road or don’t go off with their ATVs off to the private land. They stay on the road until they come to the forest service land and then they can do whatever they want to do. But I think we should put it in the newcomer package, just the summary, not the agreement, and we have to make sure whoever takes over the roads, we need to make sure they are aware of the situation on Ashley Lane so we don’t end up with this again.

Keith: I do agree with that. I also think that there should be a summary or something because also in these lawsuits it states that SLP board has to inform new members of this, of these times and mediations. So that’s something we need to continue on. When I started here, that was not informed and that technically breaks that. But we’ll start doing that and we’ll get on it.
The only question I have for Suzanne is, whenever I drive Ashley Lane or any road, and I see a gate, I immediately stop and turn around. Ashley Lane is currently gated but you have stated we have access to the national forest. Is there a lock on that gate, or can we just open it and drive through? What’s the stipulation behind the gate and why is it there then?

Suzanne: The gate is there in the event if Bob Hotchkiss ever wanted to go ahead and stop us from going through that gate... he couldn’t do that. But if he ever wanted to put a lock on the gate, he would have to tell everybody in SLPPOA what the lock was and what the combination was. The gate was another one of the provisions of the mediation. We put a gate there and it’s shut, and it’s to keep other people out, outsiders out, from Albuquerque or tourists driving around. It’s trying to deter that kind of traffic. But the gate you can open it up, shut it again, if it’s open just leave it open and drive through, you’re welcome to do that. But this is strictly for SLPPOA residents and this should had always been in a newcomer package so that everybody was aware they could use Ashley Lane to go back to the forest. It’s not private land even though it says “no trespassing”. I will write up a summary of that mediation, a very short one. I will hand it off to the secretary, Mana, and she can put it in the newcomer package after the board approves it. I’ll get a summary for you next month. Take a look at it and if it looks good, you can use it.

Keith: I think that’s perfect. Feel free to draft that out and in the meantime we will keep the communications with the individual and we’ll keep moving forward and just be careful.

4. Budget/plan for everyone’s respective areas
We need to create a budget or plan. I know Amber has been working with this on Jeremy’s about our upcoming calendar year budget and I would like to have these dug in to, it’s mainly water and roads. I want to see what your game plans are for the next year. Once we see what those are we can fuel what we need to do with our monthly assessments for everyone in the community. Because last year we just kind of added 10% to everyone. I understand we underspent this year. But when we did the 10% the thought was “well, we’ll spend it” because we overspent in legal. We didn’t have any plans, we didn’t have any actions, we had nothing. I want this year to have our budget kind of flushed out, real pretty, what are we doing for roads, are we limiting budget there, what are we doing for water, are we extending budget there, and how are we doing it? Let’s say we need to increase by x%, we can say that’s going directly to this. That will help us a lot in the future. And if we can continue to do that, it will be great. I know nobody wants to admit or be the guy that says “hey, we need to increase assessments” and I don’t want to be that either. But we are currently in a declining budget and we need to show where we are declining at and what our plans are to get out of these holes. I don’t like the idea of just spending and figuring it out later; that doesn’t sit well with me. We’ll have to sit down and really start ironing this out.
I do believe we need to notify the public by roughly Thanksgiving, of any assessment changes. So we have to notify them early so we need to have this assigned or agreed upon a month before that since our meetings are only monthly. So just keep that in mind, we’ll be working forward with this. Any concerns or questions?

Suzanne: When are we going to be working on the budget?

Amber: I am learning the ropes as we go. I just got the data from HOAMco today and I will have time this weekend to go through the data I received and I will forward everything out as soon as I get it done this weekend.

Keith: I personally think working on a budget together will be an awful experience, all the opinions running through, not to say that’s a bad thing.
Once Amber gets the last year’s budget sent out I am hoping we can have the water management team help on the water side, I am hoping David Stuedell can have a plan on his end. And after that once you have an A, B or even C plan you simply present those to the board and we can approve/disapprove and move forward. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, I know it’s important but once again, we have 10 people in here and we’ll have these meetings forever. We’re all adults and we can figure it out.
Me as a president, I don’t want to control what happens in roads; that’s David’s area. Me as a president, I don’t want to control what happens in water, that’s John Hines’ area. I want them to decide what paths forward are, and we’ll take that approach. If we need to go further and we need to talk in person, we’ll take that approach. But I want that first step taken not as a group but by individuals.

And that concludes my report.

Vice president (Scott DeWitt)

Hello, I’ve been going through the covenants for at least unit 2, which is my unit. There are several discrepancies that I believe it’s important to correct them and working on a plan to do that. For example, I realized I can’t remove a tree from my property unless it’s to build a structure or to thin at 400 stems per acre per US forest service recommendation law. 400 stems per acre is not current forest recommendation; that number is between 80 and 300, depending on the type of tree and terrain... so legally speaking that’s a big problem because that can be invalidated by the court if it’s incorrect or bogus. So I think that’s going to be my pet project.
Also, I noticed the roads – every time, as soon as we get a little bit of rain, Aspen Grove gets torn up pretty good. So I intend to work on that as well. That’s all I have.

Keith: Thank you, Scott. I do see changing covenants as an uphill battle because it takes 2/3 vote by public to change anything. I’m all for trying to put in the books and trying to make things better.

Scott: For unit 2, it says the majority. I haven’t gone through the other covenants, for the various units. I believe to change the bylaws you need 2/3 votes. But that will be my pet project, because it annoys the heck out of me.

Keith: I think that’s perfect, thank you.
We’ll move on to the secretary, Mana.

Secretary (Mana Babicz)

Hi everyone. So, September emergency meeting minutes have been completed, I’m just waiting for the other party to sign the documents and then I’ll submit it to the board for approval.
And then I’m waiting for the new board members to submit the new board members” certificates. I got one from Suzanne Star and that’s it.
And if Kristi Cross or Keith or whoever will help, I’m not quite sure what to do with them. Do I just store them in a folder on my computer or do they have to go somewhere?

And I just found out today, that’s why it’s not on the agenda; some of you might know that I’m pregnant and I’m almost full term but I’m having my baby this Thursday. So next month’s minutes might come a little late, depending on what’s going to happen. And that’s all I have.

Everyone: Congratulations.

Kristi: Mana, I’ll get with you on what to do with the minutes, and I also need, at some point, get with you on transferring all the other stuff over, and getting with you on new member packets, what you need to send out with those.

Keith: Well, thank you so much, I hope Thursday goes well for you. If you need anything, need anything taken care of at home, let us know and we’ll have things figured out for you.
I wanted the board to be aware that Mana did not send out the emergency meeting minutes to the board because we wanted to wait for the other party to sign. The reason I directed her to do that was because we kind of showed all of our cards, all of our train of thoughts, all of our thinking in that meeting. And if we ever produce those minutes online, they can as a member or not, they can log in and read those minutes. Once it is signed, once the lots are sold, we will release those minutes, we will approve them at the board level and release them and put on our website. I think that’s just safe for us.

Suzanne: This might be for Kristi – I think the secretary does this but have the officers been changed yet at the bank and the secretary of state site, that you know of?

Kristi: I do not, I wasn’t aware I needed to do that. I know that Jeremy was working on getting things changed prior to his leaving.

Keith: I have the email about the HOAMCO, I’m already working on this.

Kristi: Thank you.

Keith: And next up is treasurer, Amber.

Treasurer (Amber Gaston)

I got the data, I am working through it and learning how to process it all. As soon as I can go through data this weekend, I will get it all out for the financial statement and the budget. And then we’ll learning curve move from there, that’s all I have.

Keith: Wonderful, thank you, Amber. I’ve seen a lot of email traffic between you and Jeremy and HOAMCO lately, so I can’t thank you for all your help.

Amber: You’re welcome.

Suzanne: Amber, you may have to go ahead on the budget and make sure there’s an audit scheduled for the end of this year, it’s due.

Amber: Yes, I’ve been told by Jeremy and we’re trying to get estimates from HOAMCO right now to get that rolling. I’ve already advised HOAMCO that we need both the audit and the research study done.

Suzanne: Ok, and then just another couple of thoughts on this. When you do get the updates on the delinquents, I was wondering if you could tell me how many delinquents are below $500. Do you know that right now or do we have to wait for that awhile?

Amber: You’re going to have to wait on that, I haven’t had a chance to get there yet.

Suzanne: And then the last thing I wanted to bring up, and that’s for the whole board, is the reserve fund which would clearly describe the authorization to use, we have other policies but our reserve fund seems to be out lose. And I would be happy to draft up a policy for the board for the next session, if you’re interested. That’s just a suggestion.

Amber: Keith, what do you think?

Keith: I don’t see an issue in a draft, I don’t see an issue in looking into it. I also understand our reserves don’t look as healthy as they should but I don’t think there has been a time where we willingly pulled out a money out of it just because we wanted to. Everything we have pulled out of reserves was because we needed to. There were important infrastructure upgrades or there were emergencies for reserve funds. So I don’t think this board has been delinquent or bad at what we do; there’s just not enough money coming in and there are too many projects going out at this time. But it doesn’t hurt to look, it doesn’t hurt to look at a draft. But I am concerned that as we keep creating policies, every single hoop we need to jump through makes is a hoop that makes it harder for us to do anything. We’re already on a monthly cadence, just something to keep in mind. I don’t want hoops and hoops and hoops, I already do that at work. It doesn’t work out and I would rather not do that here.

Suzanne: There won’t be any hoops on this but you might be thinking about this board, another board but in the future there are other boards coming up. So it doesn’t hurt for us to be aware that a policy might help in the future even though our board might be just great at what they’re doing with the reserve funds. So I’ll draft up something, we’ll see what everybody thinks about it. But thanks for giving me the opportunity.

Amber: Thanks, Suzanne.

HOT TOPICS

The chipping on Aspen Grove has not been done to date. Lee Taylor had a chipper scheduled, got him here. He sent an email out, got one or two volunteers. The other two volunteers that normally help a lot on manual stuff like that are me and Josh Toennis. We ended up getting Covid during that week and weren’t able to help. So Lee Taylor had to not do chipping. There’s also still a lot of work to be done there before chipping is even ready. I plan on doing that, I got busy. I plan on trying to help, cutting those limbs up and getting them drug to the road. At this time, we still need volunteers for chipping. Hopefully we can get it done before winter. The homeowners don’t seem to care to this point but I would still like to be a good neighbor and get their property cleaned up for them. I’ll be making a Facebook post once I talk to Lee about when the next chipping availability is.

Leak volunteers: I believe all the leaks are now fixed, “ones that we can see”. There were 3 of them, John Hines will talk about that. I know he got quite a few volunteers he’d like to thank. We would like to keep volunteers in the future because fixing leaks is not a fun project. But I will eliminate leak fix on hot topics for next month. With that being said, if no one has any comments we’ll move on to the standing committee reports, and we’ll start with John Hines with water.

STANDING COMMITTEE REPORTS

Water (John Hines)

We had a busy month, to say the least. I did the weekly well and pump inspections, called for locates for suspected leaks 13 times. That’s an issue I’ll bring up later when we have more time. But it’s supposed to be when you call 811 you get people to respond to do locates for power, Windstream and for water, and I had to make a call 13 times just to get a locator out here. So I’m dealing with that right now, with the state 811 system.
When David Salazar was putting in the new line to replace the old line for Aspen Well to Forest Road 10 we discovered 2 leaks on the old line and we repaired those and I’ll talk about it later why we repaired those. Because what we’re basically going to be redoing, is replacing that old line with a new 4-inch line which we are almost completed with. I think this weekend we’ll be tying in one end of it.
I responded to a customer out of water at 1022 Los Griegos Road. I read the meters on Oct 1st, received materials from Baker Utilities for replacing the 700 feet of 4-inch line from Aspen well to Forest Road 10.
We repaired 2 leaks on Main on System 1; one at 195 Aspen Grove and one at 90 Aspen Grove. Pipes had been sheared off and basically what it was the service lines that attach to our mains have been sheared off and I would say right now the cause of that was the poor insulation and the vibrating roller was basically causing settling where they actually sheared.
We repaired another main leak at 1222 Los Griegos with same reasons suspected.
I walked and drove the waterlines after flooding for visual inspection of water lines and we are going to have to get someone to volunteer with a tractor to cover our lines up from the intersection of Los Griegos and Aspen Grove, down across where the flooding occurred because we’re getting our pipes exposed, and it’s getting that time of the year where it will freeze. So we’ll need someone to get by with a blade or something to cover up that line again.
I located lines on Aspen Grove, Los Griegos and line from Meadow Well to
Booster Pump House. I updated Water Read Center and Utility Map from Jeremy’s imprint for the new customers.
I worked with the state hydrologist on well testing and I’ll talk about that in water compliance.
I responded to questions of lead and copper rule in our water. We had a customer who had questions about lead in our water.
I responded to state CCR request. They were worried that we hadn’t gotten our CCR information for this year, which we had done, so I had that straightened out.
I prepared state Engineer Well Reading Report which finally, after a year and a half of dealing with the state on getting our well numbers corrected, they finally did that to where I can submit our well numbers online instead of emailing them.

Water Usage for Sept 2022:
These numbers are going to be very skewed because of so many leaks we had on our mains last month. I especially want to thank Shawn Weary, Eric Verret, Mike Meadows, Bill Stellwag and Scott Gould for their volunteer help with the repairing. We basically had 5 leaks on our mains last month. We pumped a lot more water than we actually used.

System 1:

the wells pumped 571,097 gallons
we used 272,502 gallons
average daily household usage: 103.22 gallons per day with a main leak rate at 52%. We lost 298,595 gallons.
leak flags: 9, with 8 of those being repeated
there were 11 users over 7,000, with 6 of those having leak flags

System 2:

the wells pumped 278,850 gallons
we used 135,356 gallons
average daily household usage: 77.79 gallons with a main leak rate of 51%. We lost 143,494 gallons.
leak flags: 1 identified
there was 1 user over 7,000 gallons with no leak flag

September was a big month for water compliance. System 1 was taken and we had 0 coliform present.

October 2022 Water Compliance Report

Also, at this time, because of state and federal regulations, we need to have our wells sampled every so many years for different chemicals and nitrates and things. This year Hovenweep was sampled for fluoride, cyanide, heavy metals, mercury, radionuclides, nitrates and volatile organic compounds in August, and the results were all negative or clear in the standards set by the EPA and Clean Water Drinking Act. The Aspen Grove well was tested for nitrates and radionuclides and the test results were also good. The Forest road 10/Meadow well was tested for nitrates and its results were also good. Copies of actual tests results are available by request, how many 0.0000 mg/l. Most of them aren’t even big enough for anything to show up. Basically what this says is we have really good water coming up from the ground.

We also had NM state hydrology report come up this month. I met with the state hydrologist and we measured our wells, the depth of our wells. We changed up some of the electronics on our sampling system that we have so we could tell what the temperature of our water is, what the depth of our water is, what the recovery rate is. Basically what has happened since last year is our water table has risen a foot, more than it was last year, and it has a very fast recovery rate. So all in all, our wells are in really good shape and we have very good water.

Something I would like to ask for is during one of the well repairs I had to have someone go to Metzger’s and get some repair parts and I would like to ask some of the board members to make a motion to refund me $34.28 for parts.
The other thing I want to mention is next Thursday I’ll be having a knee replacement surgery so I will be down and out for 2-3 days. Other than that, that’s all have unless someone has any questions.

Ann: I move to reimburse John.

Amber: I second.

Keith: Perfect, thank you John, and thank you for your busy, busy month. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done. During your outage, your recovery time, is Harold Corn going to be the water operator?

John: I’ll still be available for anything. After my knee replacement they said I can walk out. It’s an outpatient surgery so I should be available to do anything that needs to be done. I’m not concerned about it at all so I think I’ll be available. But Harold and Shawn Weary will be available if anything comes up that necessitates me jumping in a ditch and standing in a waste deep water.

Amber: Don’t mess that knee up.

Ann: Good luck to you, John. May you recover quickly.

John: Thank you, I only have 29 weeks to have the other one done.

Dave: You’ll be better off afterwards.

Suzanne: What is our water emergency number, if people have a problem, who do they call?

John: 505-228-2478.

Suzanne: Repeat, please.

John: 505-228-2478.

Suzanne: Ok, where does that go?

John: To my cell phone. If that’s not available, you can call Harold or Shawn Weary.

Keith: Wonderful, thank you John.

Roads (David Stuedell)

Good evening, everybody. I just have a very quick thing. Obviously the roads are in bad share because of the rain. Suzanne and I met with Pete over by Ashley Lane and Membres to look at the flooding situation that’s taking place at the one house on the corner. Pete has provided and I sent it just before this meeting, kind of a quote, what we’re looking at doing in that corner over there. We’re looking at putting a load, building up the road and banking it so the water goes down the corner away from the house. He’s taking $850 a load; Tug Leader is charging us $1,700 per load packed which is used asphalt, egg they call it. So Pete’s charging $150/hour for their time plus $850 a load, so I think we could probably get by by fixing that corner there for a load and say 5 hours of work. Suzanne, what are your thoughts on that?

Suzanne: I don’t know; I wish I could tell you. I know he said he would charge $150/hour but didn’t he say something about having extra equipment or two people? Yeah, I don’t know, Dave. I would say it’s going to cost a couple thousand dollars at least, to be on the safe side, that’s what I would expect.

David: Exactly, you’re thinking the same way I am. So I would like to make a motion that we allow for a $2,000 to fix that corner and I’ll work with Pete on that to make sure.

Keith: David, is Pete licensed and insured and in our vendor package?

David: That’s a good question. I’ll have to ask him that. He was the roads guy in the past so let me check with him on that.

Keith: Yes, let’s check in on that before we approve anything. Another statement: I drove up there and looked at this corner; what is happening in my eyes is there is a house uphill, all of its drainage is going down its own driveway, it’s cutting a trench 6-8 inches in their own driveway which then leads into our own HOA roads. The HOA roads then make an S curve right down to this other house. I personally feel like if we got a volunteer tractor or a volunteer back to break we could fix this for free. I will volunteer my own tractor to fix this because I think it’s kind of outrageous they’re complaining about this to us when it’s their neighbor that is causing this issue, it’s not even an HOA. Personal opinion, once again, but I will gladly fix it myself if allowed.

David: That would be wonderful.

John: No matter who you use, would you let them know that the cones and all the traffic control devices are my personal cones and devices, so don’t run off with them. The HOA doesn’t actually have any so I went and got my own, and I just assume they stay with me if possible.

Keith: And where are these cones, John? I didn’t see any up there when I was fixing, so I just want to make sure.

John: There are cones up the Aspen Grove, they go across Aspen Grove to keep people driving into the ditch part. There are also some cones on Scouts lane so I just don’t want anyone to run off with them because those are my personal cones.

Keith: I can make sure we keep those in your possession.

Amber: Thank you for those cones instead of that metal rod.

John: You’re welcome, that was kind of dangerous.

Amber: I almost wiped out a couple of times before I realized what I was driving around the first time it came up. Thanks.

Suzanne: One other thing on the fix on Ashley Lane; the fellow that has the driveway that’s draining down and creating a problem on Ashley Lane, he’s taking to Pete right now, trying to get Pete to come and mitigate that driveway problem. If that occurs, one of the things Pete was talking to us about is that if he can schedule in a couple of people and Marsha Galeson that owns that property on the corner, that’s getting a lot of run of, she was also going to work with Pete. And Pete said if he could have a number of projects in that area he could give us a break in the action on doing it.
I want to make one other comment: if you’re going to go ahead and do it yourself, you might check into the comparison of putting gravel on as opposed to egg fill on and bringing on a full load. So apparently Pete was going to work with both of those homeowners, and Ashley Lane and SLPPOA all at the same time with Dave Stuedell. So I don’t know what you want to do with it but that’s my comment.

Keith: My fix would have been taking the house that’s draining all of the drainage and instead of allowing it to follow down the road, all I have to do is do a bucket with off the side of the road, right across from where the driveway is, so that the water wouldn’t follow the road but it would dump out earlier and just dump right across. That was going to be my personal fix. I don’t know why we would need to bring in extra material over there, I don’t see that. But if the homeowner upstream fixes his drainage, that will drain differently into our roads which we’ll then have to fix again. We won’t know that until it rains.

Suzanne: It’s not going to drain into the road at all. The reason that the neighbor here is going to get his driveway fixed is so it will run off and not on to the road and try to mitigate that altogether and then create a little less of a problem down the road for the gal, Marsha’s place. At this point I wouldn’t go ahead and interfere with the neighbor who’s going to probably hire somebody to do it professionally but if you want to come in and do the other work then I guess you and Dave have to work out that agenda. But I do know this neighbor here is talking to Pete right now so maybe we better wait and find out what the whole story is.

David: I don’t have a tractor so if Keith is willing to go over there, and I agree with what Keith is saying; you could probably mitigate it quite a bit just by making sure the water goes across the street and not into those people’s driveway, I think that would be a good fix. And if we need to do something else, it would save the board, the community a lot of money so I’m all for it. I appreciate the offer.

Keith: And looking at the property, you need to start upstream as high as possible, so if that neighbor is going to have Pete professionally do it then we need to wait until Pete is done before we touch anything downstream, or it’s going to happen just like what we’re doing right now with our flooding situation. We picked everything downstream and it’s just flooding us all down again and we’ll have to fix it all over again. So we’ll let Pete work upstream, depending on how that happens. That house is on top of the hill and it will forever drain into SLP roads but hopefully he can fix something and we’ll just redirect it. We’ll just wait until Pete’s done and then we can reassess the situation.

David: Alright. The other thing is, I’m not sure if he needs to be licensed and insured for delivering gravel, but we should probably put some 5 loads on Aspen Lane where we redid the roads. So what are people’s thoughts on that?

Jonathan: I know I’m not on the board so I’m not making a decision here but just my 2 cents. Since we’re coming up to winter and a lot of that water is going to stop... and I don’t know where we are in the budget. But if a few people with tractors, myself included, got to spend an hour, we could probably scoop enough of that dirt over there, what I’m going to call the field retaining pond right before that one house where the water flows over his property. That used to be pretty deep and now it’s just kind of filled up with dirt. We could probably take a bunch of loads, get that roads passable, and then as soon as it gets to winter time, we won’t have to deal with so much water anymore; it will kind of freeze over, it will be safe enough for me to drive my plow truck over it can probably get us through the winter, until next year. And I don’t know, I doubt anything’s going to change upstream in terms of the forest layout (vegetation or anything of that nature) to stop the water but it buys us some time if we want to do that, it would save us some money. It seems like we’ve been bleeding money pretty heavily lately.

David: Yeah, that would be great. Ok, so what you’re saying is let’s have some volunteers work on Aspen and we’ll wait until next year to put gravel down.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think it’s doable, certainly enough to make it drivable. I spent an hour this evening kind of filling in at the bottom of Los Griegos just to make it smooth enough. I know it won’t last past the next really big rain but it’s manageable for now. So those are my 2 cents, I’m willing to help out there. I don’t know if Keith or anyone else with a tractor can make a Facebook post and just ask for any tractor people to come out. And I bet in an hour we can make that thing drivable, safe again. And it will last until the next big rain but it buys us time until next year.

David: Ok, sounds great, thank you everybody for stepping up to the plate. That’s all I have, Keith.

Keith: Perfect. I know Josh Toennis spent a few hours down there this last weekend fixing the road to make it re-passable again. I know him and I will volunteer our tractors to help relieve these efforts. Josh also has a little dump trailer that we could load down on Forest road, get up there and dump it but I don’t think we should do gravel this year just because we’re already over 100% overspent on roads. But next year we can for sure tackle it if we need to.

David: Ok, very good.

Jonathan: A quick question: last year you threw a tarp over the red cinders. I don’t know if you’re going to do that again this year or not.

David: Do you want me to buy a tarp and put it over the cinders, Jonathan?

Jonathan: That helped out a lot. Anywhere where the tarp was covering it, when we uncovered it, I was able to grab cinders. Anywhere where the snow got in, it just froze that stuff solid and it was like concrete so a tarp would be super useful. I looked at all of mine and none would be big enough.

David: Ok, I’ll buy a tarp, it’ll have to be a special one for that. I’ll buy it and then get reimbursed at the next board meeting.

Keith: Thank you both.

Legal (Kristi Cross)

I don’t really have anything other than thank you Keith for taking care of the Scott Turner not deciding to leave us all. I too got the email last minute and was literally driving out of town when I got it. Luckily Keith jumped in and got it all figured out, and I appreciate that more than anything.
Jonathan, thank you for doing the bottom of Los Griegos; I saw you were working hard when we got home from work and I appreciate that for one because that’s such a bump in the morning.
Other than that, I don’t have anything to share tonight.

Firewise (Ann Cooke)

I hope this week to submit our annual report for firewise communities. I have feedback from all the other communities and they submitted a new action plan approved by the president of the Jemez Mountain Fire Association. So I just need to get those inputted on the online service.
I think that’s a short and simple report on that.
From there this kind of overlaps a bit, I received a couple f communication from Paul Lasko in regard to transporting the water tanks. He met with the crane operator and he asked that I inform the board of various things. I found it a little bit disingenuous since he was meeting with the crane operator prior to our board meeting. I gather that the meeting went well and because the email was, at least in my mind, kind of controversial, contacted Lee to ask what the hierarchy of control was on this, and Paul has been tasked with organizing the movement of these water tanks. So there was a bit of confusion as to who is the decision making bodies with regard to the placement of the tanks. I don’t know if we really want to go into at this point, I’ll leave it up to you, Keith. As to whether we want to make a formal motion as to whether we want these water tanks in Sierra Los Pinos. My personal opinion is that they are a valuable addition. They will not stop a forest fire but I think they will help in the argument of lower insurance rates. But as we said, that isn’t guaranteed because the insurance companies are more and more aware that forests burn, and homes in forests can burn along with the forest. So that may be a 50/50 but at least we can argue to getting insurance more nowadays than when the insurance companies are coming into the habit of just canceling on people. So Keith, do you want to entertain a motion?

Keith: My first question to the board is: does everyone kind of understand what the tanks are, where they’re going? I just want to make sure there’s no question on tanks themselves before we make a motion to approve this. The general consensus is there are 2 tanks given to us by Intel, we’ve been trying to get them up here for 5+ years. We now have a grant to get them up here. It’s not guaranteed our insurance will go down, the big factor to this is the average house fire will take 30,000 gallons of water to put out; these tanks will have 50,000 gallons. Who knows if it will help, who knows if we’ll have time to use them. But it’s definitely an option.

Scott: Can I add something? One thing, when we have a fire, there’s no power. If we have no power, we have no water. And these tanks, according to Lee, will be mounted higher than the fire station. So we take that problem out of the equation being we don’t need power to get water anymore; we just need gravity. So we just need full tanks, basically. Not only is this a good thing; it’s a fantastic, great thing because we have a fighting chance.

Ann: Yes, I would like to add to that. Hypothetically, at a fire we would have completely full tanks for the association, our holding tanks. And that would be available in the same manner as grave fed as these particular tanks. Obviously in anyone time, the tanks aren’t necessarily full. There’s another problem with our association tanks, the line that feeds the tenders at the fire station is a 1-inch line; am I correct, John Hines?

John: Yes, but right now we’re replacing the line that goes from the Aspen Grove well down to Forest road 10. We’re replacing it because it came up as the worst leaking part of system 1 when we did our leak study. When we started replacing it, we were running a new 4-inch line. In the process we found a couple of leaks on the old line. But what I did was I repaired the old line which seems kind of funny since we were thinking of kind of abandoning it. But since I repaired it, we will have 4inch lines running directly towards the fire station to where we could actually use it. It already has a valve on it, we could actually use it to fill those tanks and use it only for that reason, to fill those water tanks with a prevention where it would not be tied into our portable water system. But that’s the reason I repaired it and kept it the way it was. So if the board would decide to go ahead and use that line to fill those tanks instead of requiring a fire department to transfer the water from the fire hydrant down at the corner of Los Griegos up to those tanks, they’ll be able to keep those tanks full at all times and we won’t have any more issues with keeping them full. And that’s the reason I did it, just thinking that the board might decide to go and use those, that old line, to fill those tanks. So as far as the water goes, we could do that if the board decides to do that.

Ann: Ok. So right now, just to clarify, we’re looking at these 2 tanks being put on the hill side above the fire station. Scott is correct; they will be gravity filled, they can literally do a fast fill at fire trucks during an emergency situation. They’re dedicated water toward fire suppression, they would also be accessible to the forest service and any other entities that the volunteer fire department has agreements with in their use. I think we have good access to Lee to make sure the abuses are avoided.
Does anyone have a comment against having these water tanks? They’re going to be on county property, not on the SLPPOA property. I gather we can discuss next whose water should bill them, and I’ll be arguing (as John Hines suggested) that SLPPOA bills them. But for the first part, does anyone have objections to these water tanks?

Suzanne: I have a question. Until we get Josh Toennis to take a look at it architecturally with the people who own the land, can we make any type of decision at all, right now?

Ann: Yes, we can make decisions. I’m asking if anyone has any objections?

Suzanne: Well, those people might have an objection but we don’t know about it yet.

Ann: I understand that and we’ll take their comments into consideration. Does anyone on the board have an objection?

Keith: So I think we’re kind of getting really far into the weeds here. We’ve spent quite a bit of time on this and really what we need to accomplish tonight is do we want the tanks or not? Because they’re going to move these things up here possibly before our next meeting and we need to decide that. We don’t care about how we fill them at this time, we need to determine if we want them.
There will be people that can see these tanks. Since they are in our plat map, they have to go through our architectural control form, as I said earlier. Josh Toennis has already been in talks with Lee, he’s already been in the talks of going down to the fire station. He knows of the situation so that shouldn’t be an issue. So the main thing is, do we want these tanks?

Ann: I’ll make a motion in the policy that Sierra Los Pinos is appreciative of the tanks and we wish them to be placed on the county property of the fire station, and that we should proceed with accepting these tanks.

Scott: Scott DeWitt seconds.

Keith: Perfect, I will let Lee Taylor know that we approved moving of the tanks.

Ann: Do you want to take a vote?

Keith: Yes, we can take a vote.
I’m just going to go right down the list here; it’s going to be yay or nay, however you want to word it. I will not vote unless there is a tie.

Scott: Yay.

Mana: Yay.

Amber: Yay.

Kristi: Yay.

Ann: Yay.

Suzanne: I can’t make a decision until I hear the architectural control, I’m sorry.

Keith: That’s fine. We have 5 out of 9, that’s majority, it is passed. I will contact Lee Taylor and I will let him know about the confirmation of accepting tanks. We’ll go through logistics later according to our CCNRs. Thank you, everyone.
Do you have anything else for firewise, Ann?

Ann: It was mentioned that this grant is going to go through the Jemez Mountain firewise association and I will try to coordinate any information between them and this board.

Keith: Perfect, I’m assuming we’ll be in close contact between you and Lee in this process, and John Hines.

Ann: Yes.

Kristi: Ann, thanks for all you’ve done and making us a firewise community. Because we are a firewise community I had to switch my home insurance because my previous insurance tripled on me after our last fire here. But just in case anybody needs to change their insurance; if you’re prior military or a family member is military, USAA gives discounts because we’re a firewise community.

Ann: That is so positive to hear. And I’d also like to comment and tell people that Jemez Mountain firewise association and myself are happy to visit anybody who wants and talk about improvements to homes and their property. No pressure. Even last year I wrote a letter for Bob Hatchkiss; he has an underground house and his insurance company was about ready to cancel him because they didn’t want to take the effort. And I’m happy to help anybody in the community assess their risks in their property.

Keith: Thank you, Ann.

Architectural (Josh Toennis)

Keith: Josh Toennis is not here for architecture. I did talk to him briefly about his section so I’ll do this the best I can.
Architectural email is 75% full I believe so we’ll have to talk to Cindy Hines about getting some of the emails relieved and/or copied down to an external hard drive. We’ll figure that out.
He said there were no new requests for the month. That concludes architecture unless anyone has any questions.

Parks (vacant)

Water management team (Suzanne Star)

I just want to ask if we can go ahead and take the WMT summary that you read, Keith, at the annual meeting and put it into the next member newsletter so that the people who weren’t at the annual meeting could understand a little bit more about what WMT is about. It basically explains the purposes of WMT and some of the current things we’re doing. Some of the topics that we discussed at the October meeting was that, first of all, I think everybody should be aware of the fact that our WMT main goal is to fix out water system and not only will that take planning but it will take money. And we need more data on how much it costs to run our water system, the labor cost to fix it, a log of what has been completed in the past, and the review of the funds that will be available in the coming year from the SLPPOA water budget, and if there are any reserves that can be dedicated to move ahead with these types of upgrades.

As you’ve heard from John Hines, he’s currently chasing a whole pile of leaves that have put a big dent on our budget, our reserves, and has restricted moving ahead and further upgrade projects. There’s only so much money that can be done without volunteers with our limited budget. So the ongoing replacement line that started in August is still in progress and the moneys to complete it are still unknown because there are still factors that could increase that cost. We’re also on hold with the proposed MOUs and the proposed WMT newsletters that I hope this new board will be able to review and approve, so we can move forward with these tasks. The MOUs are designed to protect the SLPPOA water system from negligence and abuse of our water resources, and the newsletters were just proposed to educate the members about our past and future water system issues.

We also discuss about the timely communication with the members during ongoing water projects and emergency outages, we think that needs to be improved. And when the 2023 budget is approved and we have a better understanding of what moneys we will have available next year, then WMT can focus on what water system improvements we can pursue and where the money will come. This will hopefully help the board make more informed decisions. At this point we still have more questions than answers but it’s a work in progress. And we do encourage any member to attend these meetings and bring their input, because after all, the water system belongs to all of us and it’s our responsibility to take care of it.
That ends my report.

Keith: Thank you, Suzanne, that was great. If no one has any questions for the water management team, we will perceive.

OLD BUSINESS

1) Final assignment of board positions
We ended on a long draw last time and we didn’t really assign any real positions as 2 new positions were questioned to be created. We’ll start with the first one, a water chair, that was proposed to be created. I think all of this from here will become a personal opinion.
I think this is really great. I think a water board chair supporting John Hines will be fantastic since he is busy. This person’s task can grow, shrink, however John Hines sees fit to help him complete his tasks, and hopefully get a little burden off of him.
One thing I do want to make certain that if we do come to a water vote for anything related to water, even though John Hines is a non-voting board member, I would still like to ask him his vote. We will document it officially, just like we do everything else, but that’s so if the water chair is different than what he chooses to vote, that is documented accordingly. Because at the end of the day the water chair can vote with John or can vote against John. I just want to make sure that’s documented. Either way I don’t think we’ll have that problem, but just for security sake. Other than that, I think creating a water chair is very important and useful to us as a board. What does everyone else think?

Jonathan: Again, not a board member but just interested party.
If this helps alleviate work from John and frees him up if he doesn’t want to do the politics of it, then I think you’re spot on, great idea. But if this is somehow designed to add a vote that would somehow favor water, if it’s just designed to give someone a position to vote, I don’t know what responsibility there would be, unless it’s part of the responsibilities Suzanne’s already doing with the water management team. So I guess I’m just curious if it’s all about the vote or if it’s about taking work away from John so he can focus on what he needs to do etc.

Keith: You’re exactly right thinking that. I think it’s a little bit of both, to be honest. I hope it will help alleviate John so he can be doing what he needs to do, but I also think it really helps to get a stern a vote of what our water operator wants. When it came to the co-mingle project x time ago, John Hines did not get to vote nor did he have anyone supporting him and his vote and what he wanted. And this directly affects him. So what this allows is that it doesn’t add a vote to the membership because someone on the board will move to that position. What it will do is just signify “this is what our water operator wanted at this time”.

Jonathan: But he also attends the meeting, he voices his opinion that we all hear? So if everybody votes against him, they’re going to vote against the water person that’s on his side as it were anyways, if the rest of the board is not in favor. So as far as I’m concerned, you have the board people, the more the merrier because we need that many for quorums and so forth, so I’m a fan of it; I was just trying to understand what they would do.

John: What I would really like personally is I don’t want to have 7 bosses. In the past I always worked with the president and went through the board. With water management team I realized all of the sudden I was starting to get 9 or 10 bosses instead of just 1. And it became really difficult for me to jump through the hoops to make sure everybody was being satisfied and I don’t want to do that. I want to have the board of directors of SLPPOA be my boss. I don’t want the water management team to be my boss, and I know the water management team knows I feel this way. I want them to know that they can make suggestions, they can go against what I want, I don’t care. But the bottom line is; when I have to have a definitive answer, I can go to the president and the board and say “This is what I’m planning on doing, this is how much I want to do, this is how long, how many years it’s going to take to do it...” I don’t want to have 12 bosses; I just want to have 1 with the backing of the board of directors. And that’s all I have to say about it, thank you.

Keith: With that being said, John, we could easily state that as “the board is your boss”. And we could keep that path as a status quo. But then that vote doesn’t help you as Jonathan kind of brought up.
The next question that I would pose to you is: would help from someone on the board, whether it’s a water chair or whether it’s just someone with some free time, would that be beneficial to you? I’m just trying to flush out if a position needs to be opened or if we can just keep what we’re doing. We will be your “boss” and then we move forward, or if we need to do something more.

John: There are definitely things that a “water board member” could do. As far as filing of paperwork: half of my time is spent with legalities that are required by the federal or the state government, or the water division of the environmental New Mexico or whatever. I have to do a lot of reports for them monthly. If someone could just take that off of my hands, it would give me more time to do the physical, actual water management of the water system. And I’m not complaining and I’m not saying that I can’t do it, because I have been for the last 2.5 years. I’m just saying that they could relieve me of some of that work. For example, when I read meters I leave around 10am. It takes me an hour to read the meters. I read the meters and then I spend from 11am, after I get back from reading the meters, until about 3pm organizing the water reads down to where I can make my water maintenance reports and submitting them to Mike so that he can post them on to the board. I have to pick the well readings and post them on the website for the state engineer’s office for our wells. If I could read the meters and then send them to somebody and have them do all that paperwork, that would leave me more time to do it. And I’m not complaining and I’m not saying that I can’t keep doing it, but that would relieve some of that time off of me.

Ann: I proposed at the last meeting that I would really be happy to work with John. And I was looking to fill this particular position.

Keith: I was just going to say that I know that Ann showed interest in helping John. And I know John just kind of outlined the work that would be involved with that. So I would like to ask Ann officially: would that kind of scope of helping John be ok to be put on your plate? If you keep firewise, if we create a new position... I don’t know if it matters if we create a new position because we’ll hear John’s vote as Jonathan stated. I just think John needs help. Would that be okay with you, Ann?

Ann: Yes, and I can also see other options for things that come up and researching a little bit of the requirements for like patenting water rights etc. If John is doing all the leg work on the ground, he doesn’t need to be bogged down with a lot of these other details and logistics.

Keith: Would anyone have any quarrels with Ann helping out John Hines with his work?
Wonderful. Congrats John, you got some help! And if we need to maybe take step further and create a water position, we can do that. But I think for the time being Ann will keep firewise/waterwise, I don’t care what we call it. But we’ll keep that in mind and thank you, Ann, for volunteering more of your time in helping John.

Ann: You’re more than welcome.

John: Thank you, Ann.

Keith: Wonderful. And now the last position.
Suzanne Star, in the last meeting she proposed a “communications position” for the board. I would like to hear some people’s thoughts on that. She sent out an email to what the job would be. I’ll let some people talk and then I’ll throw in my opinion if need be. And then we can get that set up and moving.

Scott: I’m not sure if that warrants its own specific position. Aren’t the duties that that would entail by what other people are doing?

Keith: I think you are correct; I think to date we’ve kind of relaxed at the communications and that’s why Suzanne has brought this up. I do think we’re getting better; we got some ideas from Jonathan Morris in the past, we post on Facebook and that has seemed to work really well. I think we can still iron out a few things and we can really get this better. Have we been good in the past years? No. Have we been better than the past years? Yes. Everyone has a different opinion about that.
So yes, technically you’re right.
Since I’m talking I guess I’ll just keep going here.
I am torn on the position because I think Suzanne is probably the most knowledgeable person here between the HOA and the HOA’s history. I do see that as potentially hurting us though, unfortunately, because there is history here, there’s a lot of history between the board and its members. Right, wrong or indifferent; it depends whose doors you knock on. I don’t know, but that could potentially hurt us as a board because I don’t know who’s going to be receiving these communications, everyone will be, and I don’t know Suzanne’s past. With that being said, I do have concerns because I know Suzanne has an active website that keeps her own minutes, that keeps her own opinions on these minutes. The website also has a book that says “How to sue your HOA” on the front page of this. I have huge concerns that now Suzanne wants to become communications. This is me just speaking out loud and being honest. Nothing against Suzanne; I’ve worked with her a lot, we’ve had very good interactions and we’ve had some slippery interactions which happens with everyone. No fault of hers, no fault of mine. I’m just bringing up the facts that there are concerns there, Suzanne, that you are keeping minutes but now you’re on the board. I don’t know if you’re continuing to keep minutes; I don’t look at your website nor will I, but that is just my opinion. I think you as being an active board member, that website either has to stop or disappear, regardless of what position you hold, because that is directly contradicting what we’ll be producing as a board in minutes, it’s contradicting everything we do. Personal opinion, but it worries me.
And the other point that I want to bring up is that you were nominated as very last to our association, you also received the least amount of votes for the new nomination. For you to come in and go “I don’t like that position, I want to do this” – I don’t think that is completely right as we don’t know any of the history here, we don’t know how well we jive, we don’t know anything. We are a brand new board and what position is, is parks. It’s the only available position. Not to mean that that can’t change; we have nothing but time here. I’m not going anywhere and I don’t think you are either. And if you want to put in a year and things go very, very well, we’ve moving forward and working together, and we realize Suzanne is great and her website has stopped producing information, I think we could move you to a different position that is not parks. But at this time, parks is the position available.

Kristi: I have to say, as personal opinion as well, I agree with Keith. I know when I first started as secretary I was highly concerned about the minutes that were being produced on Suzanne’s website because they were in conflict with the official minutes that I was producing for the board. And as a certified court reporter that to me is very disheartening because I’m used to typing everything verbatim and by record and by law, according to what is exactly said, word by word, in court. And I question whether or not my notes could be potentially called into question in the court of law if someone decided to sue again and bring up minutes from both websites, regardless because ours were voted on, ours were official, but it still cast that doubt in there. And I didn’t appreciate the doubt when, by oath, as a previous court reporter, had to type everything verbatim. And that was a huge concern of mine about the conflict there.

Keith: There’s a lot of silence, and I know this is not a fun topic. I’ve been dreading this, trust me, I have not enjoyed this in my head since the last meeting went down. But I want to better us as a board. I want to better SLP as an HOA board, I think there’s a lot of potential here with Suzanne on the board, I do. And I don’t want to jump to anything but there are concerns, legal concerns, on my opinion. I want Suzanne on the board, I think she’s helpful. She’s been very helpful even in the first month she’s been here. Am I going to open up a new position for it? I don’t think so, personally. And not to say she didn’t have her concerns with parks, that she doesn’t have a family or equipment, maybe not even a physical ability to do so. Maybe the first part of communicating is communicating through Facebook, helping the board communicate through emails to get volunteers, to do the mowing of these parks because we do have insurance for these parks and they do need to be maintained. That is part of why we have insurance as an HOA. I don’t know what your thoughts are, Suzanne, but I haven’t heard anything in either direction to date except from Scott and Kristi. Would you take the position of parks and help out the board as a volunteer?

Suzanne: No, I am not going to take the position of parks but I will go ahead and agree with you; let’s just let it go for a year. I work on the WMT...

Keith: Hey Suzanne, would you be able to repeat your last statement? I completely lost service and all I heard was let’s just give it a year.

Suzanne: Ok, all I was saying was no thank you to the parks, I’m not interested in the parks. However, let’s go ahead and we’ll just give it a year and see how it goes. I’m on the WMT team. I’ll just go and take my responsibilities at that point and do the best I can there. And whatever I can help the board, I’ll help the board.

Keith: Thank you, Suzanne. I really can’t appreciate enough for you to still stick around and help us because it is helpful to have help. With that being said, I’ll take you not taking parks as a voluntary resignation for the year. When we come up in the next year, you will have to get re-nominated to get votes to get back on the board. But we’ll gladly accept you at that time and maybe create a position for you.

Suzanne: You still haven’t made a mention of what the votes were, all the new people. Do you have that record?

Keith: I don’t have that on me.

Kristi: I have that information. If you give me 2 seconds, I’ll let you know what it was. Let me just pull it out.

Suzanne: Ok.

Kristi: According to the vote tallies, we had 107 votes for Scott Dewitt, 80 votes for Mana, 17 votes for Amber, 13 votes for Suzanne, and 13 votes for me.

Suzanne: What happened to Ann Cooke?

Kristi: She was already a part of the board.

Keith: I thought she got 4 votes.

Kristi: She did get 4 votes, I’m sorry.
And then we had a 1 right in vote for a Benjamin *couldn’t understand the last name*

Keith: Perfect, thank you Kristi and thanks for having that on hand.
Does anyone else have any other questions, comments, concerns?

Scott: For the most part I share Kristi’s and your concerns. I made a mistake and looked at that website. I’m very concerned as to why someone that would post that information would want to participate in basically serving. That’s all I got.

Keith: Perfect. With that being said, old business is now complete.

NEW BUSINESS

1) Budget preparation deadline
I’ve talked about this earlier so I’m not going to touch on it too much. I know last year we had to get it done well ahead of time so I legitimately think we have to have our budget outlined by our next meeting. I should say not budget but our assessment amount approved at our next meeting, just so everyone’s aware. And that is by our bylaws at max a 10% increase so there will be for some people to really try and iron out the budget by our next meeting so that if we do need to increase, we can justify it; if we need to hold, we can justify it. I’m an engineer and now a program manager, I like to be able to justify why I make my decision so hopefully we can get a justification in there. I will probably be harassing a few of you to try and get that lined out.

2) Intel tank(s) discussion/grant/cost/setup time
We have discussed this for 25 minutes at the beginning, 20 minutes or so in Ann’s section. I think that course is now good and ready to go. Does anyone have any more thoughts on that before I just skip it?
Wonderful. That concludes our meeting, everyone. Our next board meeting is Tuesday, November 15th 2022 at 18:30 via zoom.

Suzanne: When are we going to get the financials for this month?

Keith: Amber stated earlier in her section that she just now got the reports, either today or yesterday. She will not have time to work on those this week; she will work on getting those out to us this weekend. She’ll give that information to me, I will put them in the proposed agenda and I will send that out to everyone with updated values. Those will also be attached with our minutes by Mana as an attachment or an appendix.
With that being said, I will try to create an agenda a little earlier so I’m not rushing last minute like I always am and we’ll get that sent out. There will be a google doc link for anyone that wants to do it early or if you just do it during the week, you just want to get it out, feel free to jump on that. I’ll try and get it created this coming weekend.

Keith Rigney made a motion to adjourn the meeting; Kristi Cross seconded, motion carried and the meeting adjourned at 8:40pm on 10/11/2022.