Posted on 07/14/2002 9:00:06 AM PDT by SierraWasp
Edited on 04/12/2004 5:40:52 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
You know, the one that's PRESIDENT of the Ho Moaners Assn?
Here she is in real life!!!
Uh Huh... Uh Huh... Uh huh...
A homeowner is determined to fight a CC&R panel she says is 'out of control.'
By Peter Hecht -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, July 14, 2002
In a community recently driven to distraction over the color yellow, Melinda Bula had a pang of worry that she'd be targeted next.
Members of the El Dorado Hills Design Review Committee, the arbiters of community standards in this Sierra foothills enclave, had told a homeowner in another neighborhood that she couldn't have a permit to replace her aging roof because her house was too yellow. The much-publicized crackdown on the "yellowest house in El Dorado Hills" ignited talk radio airwaves in the Sacramento region -- and gave Bula cause for concern.
Her house in El Dorado Hills' Oak Ridge Village subdivision had been painted a version of the offending color by the contractor who built the farm-style home seven years ago. And Bula and her husband, Joe, had just spent $6,000 for a fresh coat of yellow without asking the DRC's blessing.
So Melinda Bula, an interior designer whose custom wallpaper creations have been featured in Better Homes and Gardens and Sunset magazine and in model homes at the Trump Palace development in New York, figured that she'd better cover her bases: She sent off a $25 application fee and color sample to members of the Design Review Committee.
Not long after, a neighbor who happened to be at one of the DRC's 7:30 a.m. Tuesday meetings called Bula on his cell phone. You wouldn't believe what they're saying about your house, he told her. Not only did committee members disapprove of her yellow paint, they couldn't stand her white picket fence. They argued that both were violations of community standards.
Furious, Bula got into her car, rushed to the meeting and confronted the panel.
"I said, 'I'd like you to sit here as a board and tell me what gives you the credentials to pick colors,' " Bula said. "My house is one of the nicest in the neighborhood."
As she continued spiritedly, she said DRC Chairman John Loveless, an El Dorado Hills resident and transportation engineer, pounded his gavel and asked: "Would you just shut up?"
"I didn't use the phrase," Loveless said later. "But I did have a problem getting control of the meeting from her."
The testy exchange has roots dating back to 1983, when local voters passed a ballot initiative -- Measure B -- that gave the El Dorado Hills Community Services District the power to enforce the community's "covenants, conditions and restrictions," rules incorporated into homeowner deeds to promote a vision of suburban orderliness. Along with CC&R enforcement, the district, with a $3.2 million budget, oversees 12 parks, a community center and pool. It employs 24 full-time and 100 part-time workers.
Residents pay a $10 annual tax to fund CC&R enforcement, including the salary of a Community Services District employee who drives around El Dorado Hills jotting down the names of violators who work on boats in their driveways, store their trash cans in plain view or paint, landscape or maintain their homes inappropriately. Enforcement of the CC&Rs can involve sending violation notices to residents, withholding approval of home improvement projects and in rare cases, suing to force residents to comply.
El Dorado Hills has more than 90 sets of CC&Rs that various subdivision builders drafted as a pledge of quality assurance and that home buyers agreed to when signing their purchase contracts. The Community Services District enforces CC&Rs for about 70 percent of El Dorado Hills, excluding the sprawling Serrano development, which imposes and enforces its own standards.
In recent years, El Dorado Hills has nearly doubled in population to more than 20,000 residents who live in suburban tracts and custom homes painted mostly in muted earth tones. Local tensions increased as the Community Services District stepped up enforcement of community standards. Last year, the district -- which had budgeted $115,000 -- spent more than $170,000 to enforce CC&Rs.
"The CSD board said people are saying we're a paper tiger, that we're not doing enough for enforcement," said Wayne Lowery, the Community Services District director. "We became very aggressive about going after violators."
But Bula says there was nothing written about yellow in her CC&Rs when she and her husband bought their home. And other critics say many of the guidelines are vague or contradictory and that enforcement often depends on the personalities and whims of members of the Community Services District's Design Review Committee.
Over the years, the Community Services District and design committee cobbled together a "Design Review and Approval Handbook." The patchwork quilt of standards is based on scores of CC&R documents and interpretations of the intentions of subdivision builders, including developers who may have died or long since moved on.
Although some CC&Rs in El Dorado Hills say nothing about house colors, the handbook spells out a "rule of thumb" ban on any "bright primary" house colors and "pure hues" of "red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet."
"This group performs a very valuable service," said Joanne Davis, a local Realtor who has served 18 years on the DRC, emerging as the panel's most energized member dedicated to keeping yellow houses from flowering amid the community's earthy tones.
"You have very high property values here. There's a reason that 95762 is one of the most desired zip codes in the region. It's definitely the CC&Rs and the CC&R enforcement."
Even so, last year, the Community Services District, concerned about neighborhood antagonisms, appointed a residents panel to review the DRC's role. Critics charged that the committee, whose members are volunteers appointed by the elected CSD board, have become a governing body with unrestricted power driven by personal tastes. The panel recommended that DRC members be limited to four-year terms and that qualifications be set for who serves.
The Community Services District didn't act on the recommendations. Instead, it created a second task force to go through the Design Review and Approval Handbook paragraph by paragraph to see if the standards should be rewritten.
"These documents have grown like top seed," said task force member L.G. Lloyd, a retired U.S. Air Force major and 17-year resident who got a taste of the standards when he was told he couldn't put up a television antenna in 1985, before the community had cable television.
"No one knows who really wrote them," said Lloyd. "As a member of the military, I've given up more of my freedoms than most people. But I didn't give away everything. Before I came here, I had never heard of a CC&R."
The task force already had begun its work when controversy exploded over the DRC's refusal to issue Crown Village resident Michelle Valencia a permit to build a new roof unless she agreed to repaint her yellow house a more neutral shade.
Valencia protested vehemently, saying she shouldn't be forced to pay $2,800 to repaint a house that was yellow when she bought it two years ago.
Publicity over the showdown lit up talk radio phone banks. Listeners of Sacramento radio station KXOA rallied to Valencia's cause, rounding up contractors and volunteers who repainted her house for free to a muted shade of "velvet cream."
Valencia, who got her roof permit, recently sold the house. Following the death of her father in the Bay Area, she said she plans to move with her two children and her mother to a larger home in the community.
But the controversy spurred a community backlash that has spilled over into local politics. The issue of CC&R enforcement is expected to be a campaign issue when three seats on the CSD board are contested in November.
"We don't want to get rid of the CC&Rs. But we want to see them fairly applied," said Crown Village resident Liz Grainger. "We don't want to have a 'Gestapo.' "
Grainger recently circulated petitions for a ballot measure seeking to eliminate the DRC and to remove CC&R enforcement from the Community Services District, giving them instead to El Dorado County. She dropped the effort after learning of the task force now reviewing the community standards.
Meanwhile, another showdown over yellow is under way.
Refusing to repaint their house, the Bulas made an appeal last week before the Community Services District board of directors. Board members deferred a decision, saying they wanted first to hear from the task force debating acceptable colors. If they lose the appeal, Melinda Bula said, they may hold out, testing the board's willingness to take them to court.
"I am fighting them tooth and nail," she said. "They're out of control."
I can understand something glaring like green and purple stripes spattered like old-fashined lineoleum ('member that?! LOL) with pink dots, or something equally bizarre.
May those on the Council be sentenced to live in a shack in Mexico where Bright is Right!
After my Dad passed away we sold his home, the home I grew up in. The evil witch that bought it bulldozed it to the ground (the only house in a 50 year old sub-division to be done so) and built what looks like a witch's castle. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the other homes.
Shortly after the witch's castle was complete the neighbor across the street painted their house buttercup yellow. I do mean bright buttercup yellow! And everytime I drive by it looks like they've put on a fresh coat. hehehe!
There has to be a limit to the power these people think they have.
I always thought one could not sign away Constitutional rights.
I also thought that justified use of power is acceptable only in cases of real danger or health threats. Not manufactured ones.
What gives?
Isn't it a great analogy to expose the motives of "The Government Lovers?"
Why... Didn't you know that our rights are granted to us by our GOVERNMENT?
That's why we don't need "under God" in the pledge! (sarchasm off)
That's what the godless government lovers want us to believe!!!
Yes... This is today's breed of "Freedom Fighters!"
If one free entity signs a contract with another free entity, it is NOT Nazi/Communist/bad to expect the signee to honor the contract they signed.
Don't like HOAs? Then don't live in neighborhoods where they exist. Problem solved.
You can't even change the variety of grass seed on your lawn or take out a dead flower plant and replace it without the approval of the planning and building department. This isn't CC&Rs or a homeowners association, it's government!
Now LadyX... There is nothing "equally bizarre" to the attitudes infecting my occupied territory... it's BUZZZZZZZARRE HERE!!!
Hey! It's written right into CA real estate LAW!!! It's called "EQUITABLE SERVITUDE." It's "For The Good Of All," don'tcha know? (Actually, it's correctly called Commonism!)
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