April 8, 2012
President’s Note

I want to thank all the mountain residents who turned up Saturday morning to enjoy a community breakfast, and then helped with clubhouse cleaning work.  Special thanks go to Dan Stapleton for coordinating the breakfast, and to Paul Scheingold for arranging the outside cleanup.    The workgroup made a great dent in some of the scrub trees and brush that was building up along Ridge Road.  A chipper rented by the BRMCA made short work of the small trees and brush. We also cleaned up the area around the basketball court and took two loads of debris to the dump.  A team also cleaned the inside of the clubhouse.

A number of BRMCA board members and mountain residents met with the staff of Supervisor Candland on March 26 to discuss road issue. Some of the material the board presented to county staff is available on the Roads section on the web site.   In short, we reviewed the status of the roads with county staff, reviewed our maintenance request to the county, and discussed a number of improvements to the roads to support emergency vehicle access to parts of the mountain.  We also discussed the current road levy and answered questions about our plans.  The BRMCA board informed the county that they request that the bond levy be maintained at the current .20 mil rate for Fiscal Year 2013 so that the last bond payment can be made and still leave money for more road maintenance.  The county has not spent a significant amount of money on road maintenance over the past 5 years because the bulk of the service levy went to pay off the bond to pave the roads.  Now that it gets paid of this summer, we will work with the county to accelerate the road work.

We also re-affirmed that if the maintenance backlog can be caught up in the next year or so, that the board would seek to drop the service levy back down to pre-bond levels (page 16 of the presentation).  The board also confirmed to county staff that the maintenance backlog has the highest priority, followed by some of the emergency vehicle access.

The board is moving forward on one project though. We received a $7,500 grant from the state Firewise program that has to be used by this summer, so the board is working with the county and some mountain residents to determine which project can be addressed with the grand funds.

Now that the weather has warmed up, we will be moving our monthly board meetings back to the BRMCA clubhouse on Ridge Road. Our next board meeting will be Sunday, April 15th at 12:00.

Regards
Glenn Cruickshank
President, BRMCA