Trash Collection
QUESTION: I just moved into a new townhome community. The HOA is still run by the builder who contracts with a management company for maintenance to common areas and trash collection. The builder inadequately planned for trash collection. There are no garages or areas to place collection recepticles for collection. I was told by the buider to store the recepticles to the rear of our property and cart them around the building to the front on collection days. Unfortunately, owners would need to trespass into the backyards of other owners to accomplish this task. If anyone builds a fence, this would make the plan infeasible as well. The management company is evasive. They refuse to appropriately address the problem in a timely fashion and continue to say they are "working on it." It is clear the builder did no planning for trash collection. They did say that a dumpster will not be considered. I suggested a non-obstrusive trash bin caddy in a common area near the parking lot, but no action has been taken. We are all throwing our trash into construction dumpsters, but soon they will be gone. The collection company agrees there is a problem. Since we are the first two townhome buildings, there is no system in place at this time. Any ideas of what to do? ANSWER: The first thing you should do is to carefully review the governing documents of your HOA to see if the developer provided for owners to have "easements" across each other's properties. It would not be uncommon that the Declaration establishes an easement in favor of each owner to cross any other owner's property for purposes of ingress/egress, utility line repairs, or for any other number of reasons.
Your documents may not specifically mention the right to drag your garbage cans across the neighbor's property to the curb, but that right might be implied by some broadly-worded easement contained in the Declaration (of course, we would need to see the actual document to advise more specifically). If such an easement does exist, than it would prevent a neighbor from building a fence to block your use of that easement. Alternatively, your governing documents should specifically discuss whether or not fences are allowed to be erected. If the worst-case scenario is true and there is nothing in the documents to help you as you claim, then you should send the developer a written request to revise/amend the governing documents to provide for the appropriate easements. While there are only 2 townhome building at this time, this task should be easier than if you wait for all units to be sold (then you'll have to get an untold number of owners to agree to this). Gregory J. Montero