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Board may expand to include all houses

The Heather Lakes Homeowners Association hopes adding nearby homes will improve the appearance of the overall residential area.

The mailboxes on Windingwood Avenue don't get The Headliner, the newsletter from the Heather Lakes Homeowners Association.

Neither do more than 650 other homes in northern Heather Lakes, a community of some 1,250 houses.

That changed this month, when the board spent an extra $150 to send the newsletter to every Heather Lakes home for the first time.

The mass mailing is part of an effort to bring the entire community under the association's umbrella, a move that could speed up the association's ongoing attempts to improve the aging neighborhood.

The 684 homes that run parallel to Lumsden Road aren't part of the association because they were built in the 1980s by a different developer. Those homes aren't governed by the mandatory deed restrictions meant to keep yards neat and fences uniform. When residents there let the grass grow wild, park abandoned cars out front or paint their homes bright purple, the association can't do a thing.

The board of directors hopes to change that.

"These homes are where most of the crime is, where some of the biggest aesthetic problems are," said Scott Laugherty, president of the board of directors. "We realize that many of these people really care about their streets, so we want to work with them."

Besides the mailing, which cost about $340 instead of the usual $190, the association has invited everyone in the community to its Autumn Fun Fest for Kids, scheduled for 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Heather Lakes Park. A $1,500 county grant will pay for the party. Advertising covered the cost of the additional newsletter mailings.

The 12-page October-November newsletter includes an open letter from Laugherty, inviting homeowners who aren't part of the association to join - and to urge their neighbors likewise.

"Through deed restrictions, we can clean up the few bad homes that give the rest of the older sections and Heather Lakes in general a bad name," Laugherty writes. "We can work together as a group to clean up crime and improve property values."

Laugherty acknowledged that it won't be easy to persuade more than 600 homeowners to live by deed restrictions.

"We're anxious to see what kind of response we get from this, through attendance at the meetings, e-mails, hits on the Web site," he said.

"We're going to do as much as we can to get everyone involved," Laugherty said.

Association members pay $240 a year in dues that cover maintenance of the community, but Laugherty said the board is considering waiving dues for an initial period or reducing them to lure the additional homes.

- Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at 661-2443 or svansickler@sptimes.com