"It's just trash! Why should I care? My trash is getting collected and it's a fair price. What's the big deal?"
We totally understand that line of thinking. We are not at all concerned about trash collection. Frontier seems to be a great company, and we have no issues with them. The issues that concern us are totally with the actions being taken by our HOA Board. Below is a list of reasons for concern:
1. The Board decided to implement consolidated trash, and they have the right to do so. However, they chose to only read the first half of Deed Restriction 2.14. The first half says they can implement consolidated trash collection. It goes on to say, "AND charge for such service as part of the assessments described in Article III." That means the HOA can sign a contract with a trash service, pay the trash service directly, and then must get reimbursed through dues. The Board did not want the responsibly or workload of getting reimbursed through dues, so they chose to ignore that part of the rule. Why does that matter? It matters because the contract they signed with Frontier has a termination clause that says if any default occurs that cannot be cured within a month, they have the right to terminate the contract and demand full payment of the remaining 5-Year contract term. So, if any one member defaults (does not pay their bill, or uses a different provider, or contracts with a different company for a slide-off dumpster or hires someone other than Frontier for bulk waste pickup), Frontier could terminate their service and bill the HOA (US) well over $100,000. Plus, we would have to all hire a new trash company. If the Board had followed the rule, there would be almost no risk of a default because they would be paying one bill instead of up to 122 lots paying a bill 4 times a year. The responsibility of any HOA Board is to protect its membership from financial risk. This may not seem like much of a risk, but Rule 2.14 was written it was for this very reason. This Board decided to let us take the financial risk because they did not want to take on the workload to manage it.
2. When the contract was finally revealed to us, we began to question how this contract came to be. Those questions did not seem to be appreciated. There were Facebook postings stating that anyone that does not comply could be fined, liens could be put on property, and foreclosure was even mentioned. See Below:
3. There were several postings on Facebook for a few days where the Board took a defensive approach to any questions or suggestions about how this could have been done differently. It became obvious that they had made a lot of decisions without our input and they did not want to discuss or reverse any of them. There were some statements that actually disturbing. Here is one example:
The Board had just signed a 5-Year contract without showing it to anyone. So, we were all committed to a 5-year contract with a termination clause, forced to cancel our current provider, made to create a new account with Frontier, told you cannot use another provider even for a roll-off dumpster, and the rate can increase 6% each year. And according to the above posting the Board thinks it can make us do all of this without giving us any information or option to vote. WOW!!!! That's the kind of cooperative and communicative spirit we need.
4. On April 4, 2026, the Board held their Annual Members Meeting. The budgeted cost for that meeting was $1500. A food truck was paid $800 to be there. The agenda for that meeting had no item listed about trash service. There was some discussion about consolidation of trash, but the members believed it was tabled for further discussion at a future meeting. When questioned about that at the 3rd Quarter Board meeting held on August 11, 2026, the Board President said the motion to table the discussion was never approved so the Board went ahead and approved the contract. The membership never got to see the proposed contract and were never shown any bids from other providers. The Board made a point of getting the meeting over as quickly as possible and even promoted doing that in the Facebook post you see below:
