Minutes from the May 6th Quarterly Association Meeting

LAHA Quarterly Meeting
7pm, May 6 at Hickory Woods School
29 in attendance

1. Introduced the new officers to the association.
2. Referenced the phone calling effort taking place to try to capture email addresses for all lakes area residents. Objective: less expensive and more frequent neighborhood communication.
3. Association officers, based on current financials, made the decision to not attend the Water Quality conference. Conference materials will instead be requested and the association will restore plans to attend with the expected improved 2009 financial position.
4. The longer term Water Quality plan is to bolster association membership. Right now, there are fewer than 50 member households out of nearly 1000 possible around Shawood and Walled Lakes. We have the potential to be one of the largest, if not the largest, homeowners associations for either Novi or Walled Lake. At current participation rates, however, we are far from a unified front in front of city government. We will be pushing hard through 2008 to increase member participation (and with it visibility at City Council meetings). With that additional momentum, we will then hone our association messaging for the city governments and leverage our association influence to protect property values and the quality of the lakes and the neighborhoods.
5. Encouraged all attendees to visit the LAHA website frequently (www.lahalifestyle.com) and utilize the comment opportunities below each article posted, as well as emailing any of the officers with feedback and agenda items for the upcoming association meetings. (As a point of reference, the initial cost to create and host the site was donated.)
6. Upcoming social event discussed. Association is looking at hosting a social event in June/July for current members and prospective members. A social committee was established and updated information will be provided later this month. Members were also encouraged to solicit other ideas for social events for the year via the officers' email addresses listed on the website. Goal for this year is to do 2 association events.
7. Attendees were encouraged to sign up if they were interested in a LAHA-sponsored boating class. Recruiting other interested friends and family was also encouraged to help hit the class size requirement. Jeff Laz will coordinate and provide updated information.
8. The Legislative Committee is meeting regularly and currently researching the possible positions for LAHA when it comes to ongoing lake weed eradication and lake health maintenance. Committee will report back on progress at the next quarterly meeting. Members attending the meeting encouraged the officers and committee to also look into the short-term solutions being utilized by Wolverine Lake as a stop-gap measure. Mark Adams, LAHA member, was in communication with Novi city leaders and received encouragement that curb-side weed pick up would be a reality this summer. Mark to research details further and communicate them to the association as soon as possible.
9. City Council attendee volunteers were identified and Jeff Laz will be putting out an attendance rotation later this month.
10. Treasurer update: $714.96 is the current balance. (newsletter mailings were running in excess of $300 each). It was also discovered that the IRS had the incorrect organization information on file and now requires the organization to file annually. Nancy Galloway is working to correct and address both issues.
11. 2008 Membership update: 14 paid members prior to the meeting; 5 new member sign-ups at the meeting (vs. 50 total members in 2007)
12. Motions were made and voted on to:
- officially change the name of the association to the current Lakes Area Homeowners Association (vs. the out-of-date Lakes Area Residents Association)
- move the organization to a fiscal calendar year for future accounting simplicity
- install Beth Adams to fill the previously vacant Secretary position

The New LAHA Website

We hope you find the new website enjoyable and informative. In the future, we will use this site to keep all area residents updated on activities of the association and on new community developments or news. Members will also receive quarterly e-mails with additional information and special discounts from local businesses.

This change was triggered by our desire for more frequent communication with you and the ever-escalating costs of postage. In addition, the site has been structured to encourage all of our members to interact and comment on issues important to them and the area. Issues that too often don't have sufficient time to air in quarterly meetings.

Please spend some time familiarizing yourself with the site. Practice making a comment to a recent blog post. Check out the label tags or other valuable site links. Send us an email telling us what you think. Try out the hyperlinks sprinkled throughout. For the more sophisticated, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed which, I think, notifies you when new content is posted (or something like that).

We are also hoping to gather some of the best lake photos you've taken over the years, feature one new one each month on our home page, and post the rest in the "Around the Lake" online gallery (a link is located on the left side of the home page). Simply email your photos to greg.iszler@lahalifestyle.com (include a possible caption, names of those pictured and the photographer, and the date of the photo).

If you have any suggestions on the website or what you would like to see featured, let us know. We look forward to your feedback.


*For our members who still wish to receive hard copy communication from us, we will print out and hand-deliver hard copies of the site content upon request.