2021 Neighborhood Updates
The Ravenwood South Board and Leadership team met on Tuesday Jan 12th to discuss a few items heading into 2021:
Annual Meeting - We normally have our full annual neighborhood meeting in January. That's when we try to get all our neighbors together and:
- Give everyone an update on how our finances look.
- Discuss how the previous year went.
- Talk about what will be happening in the upcoming year.
- See what are everyone's main concerns.
After the meeting is over, we put out the newsletter summarizing the highlights of our full neighborhood meeting and give everyone their annual dues invoice.
This year, with the pandemic still a concern, we're going to hold off on having our annual meeting until it warms up enough to have the full neighborhood meeting outside on the back deck of the Springfield Lake Boathouse like we did for our Major Expenditures meeting.
We'll probably have this meeting around the middle of March, which still won't be that warm, but a lot better than January. Also, instead of having this meeting on a Monday evening, we'll try to schedule it on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon while the sun is still out to make it warmer.
Once we've got a date and time picked out, we'll send out emails, create a Facebook event, post signs on all three entrances, etc.
If anyone wants to get a jump start and go ahead and pay their 2021 HOA dues, you can use the online Dues payment form on the website. When we send out the 2021 dues invoices after the annual meeting, anyone who has already paid their dues ahead of time will be reflected as not owing anything.
Security Cameras - You've probably noticed that we've got the security cameras installed on each of the three entrances to the neighborhood on Glenhaven, Pratt and Nottingham.
We're still figuring out all the details for how the cameras work and coming up with the best system for monitoring the footage. We will wait and discuss this in more detail at the annual neighborhood meeting which will give us a few months to kick the tires a little bit and get more familiar with the system.
But we've seen some discussion about the cameras on the Ravenwood South Facebook page and wanted to mention a couple of items:
Limitations - These cameras are intended to only be used in situations where the police would get involved. All they are focused on is capturing the license plate. They do provide information about the make and model of the vehicle, but it's not always 100% accurate. For example, here's one of the records returned for HOA President Brian Ash's orange Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Note that it lists the vehicle as red rather than orange. The Flock system only has certain color choices and it picks the closest one. Also note that you don't see the driver. Just the license plate. The reason it captures the back license plate is that in the State of Missouri, you're only required to have a license plate on the back of your vehicle.
For the discussion on the Facebook page about cars speeding in the neighborhood, this system isn't really designed to address that. It's more for if there's a break in or something where you have information that you'd want to turn over to the police.
Again, we're still learning how the system works and what it can and can't do. But we wanted everyone to have realistic expectations.
Security Camera Committee - We've discussed creating a new Security Camera committee to respond to neighbor inquires about camera footage.
The problem we're running into is that the burden of doing all the behind the scenes work to keep the neighborhood running smoothly is falling on a few volunteers. No one gets paid for their time. So we'd like to distribute the workload more evenly with this new system.
Some people chime in and say "we need to do this" but aren't willing to step up and help out.
We don't think there would be a lot of work involved, but we'd like to see if anyone is interested in volunteering to lead a new Security Camera Committee.
Duties would involve becoming more familiar with the system, communicating with Flock to get any questions answered and being responsible for responding to neighbor inquiries.
If you're interested, please send an email to contact@RavenwoodSouth.com.
