President's Column - January, 2018
Editor's note: this is the first of a series of regular blog entries by members of the Board. The Board hopes to send updates every 4-6 weeks.
Happy New Year! I hope that all of you have made resolutions to get up to Hidden Lake more in the coming year. Due to some health issues, I didn’t get to visit nearly as much in 2017 as I would have liked. But, I am planning to try and make up for it in 2018!
Your Board met several times over the Fall and finalized the 2018 budget near year end. A copy of the budget has been posted in the Documents section of this website. We have had some major expenses in recent years (new grader, lake weed treatments, etc) but have been able to keep our dues flat for a number of years. We hope to keep things that way by carefully managing our inflows versus outflows. Our Treasurer, Brad Snyder, is also working a financial protocol document that will help govern our accounting policies. We hope to have this in place by the next annual meeting.
The Board also developed a new indemnity agreement that property owners need to sign before utilizing any association equipment or contracting with our caretaker for snowplowing services or any other services on your property. Many of you have signed the new document already. If you haven’t, I highly encourage you to do so now rather than waiting until you have a critical need. The new form can be accessed and reviewed on this website.
There are a couple of other items worth mentioning to you in this article. First, most of you are aware that the POA keeps a fuel tank at our caretaker’s cabin to provide diesel. fuel for our heavy equipment. The tank had become quite old and weatherworn and there was concern that it might fail at some point in the future and leak. For that reason, the Board elected to replace the old tank with a modern one. The new tank will be much safer for our personnel and for the environment.
Second, if you follow Joe Stehling’s precipitation reports, you know that we have not had much snow so far this season. Hopefully, we will get a lot more between now and Spring. Getting good snowfall is critical in helping keep things from getting too dry and to help keep our lake levels up.
Last, but not least, we have had some high winds at the lake this winter (surprise, surprise) and at one point the winds were high enough to uproot our association floating dock and blow it to the opposite side of the lake. Since the lake is now iced over, the dock cannot be moved back into place until Spring. We will plan to get the dock moved back as early in the season as we can.
That’s all for now. Enjoy the rest of your holiday time off and see you soon at Hidden Lake.
John Adamick HLPOA President
