My husband and I have recently gone the rounds with the HOA to have a wrought iron fence installed in our front yard (DRC recommended wood picket style instead). This entire process has taken over three months when it should have been resolved by the end of June.

We submitted our request for the wrought iron fence to the DRC for their meeting in May. At that time, they stated it should be a wood picket fence.

We met the deadline to appeal the DRC ruling for the Covenants Committee meeing in mid-June. Due to not many members attending the Convenants Committee meeting in June, our appeal was forced to wait until they met in mid-July.

The Convenants Committee met in July and sided with our appeal and made the recommendation to the BOD that we should be allowed the wrought iron fence.

We were told our appeal would be ruled upon at the July 28th BOD meeting. After calling the HOA office all day on 7/29, we were informed that our issue wasn't addressed because the BOD president wasn't at the meeting and he wanted to weigh in on the issue and because it was an "open meeting" (if that was the case, why were we told we would BOD would vote on our appeal that night?). As some form of lame solace, I was also assured by the HOA that several residents were in the same boat as us due to the Covenants Committee not meeting in June (really, I should feel better that I am not the only resident being hosed in this process?).

We were told that the BOD would now review our appeal at the end of August when they BOD met again. At that point, I got very upset since this has been going on since May and clearly no one seems to care about the number of times we have been told something would happen and it hasn't (we were assured this would be resovled in July!). Regardless of the answer, we want the fence installed before winter and are being required to rip up all of the grass in our front yard and replace with shrubs, etc., so waiting for winter wasn't exactly ideal either for that.

Finally, the BOD agreed to hold an "off-meeting" last Thursday to discuss our issue (I don't think this would have happened if we hadn't gotten upset).

We met with the BOD for a short period of time during this meeting and no one even bothered to apologize for the hell that we have been through and why this has taken so long. Candis with the HOA has apologized several times, but it would have been nice to have the BOD acknowledge that this process has taken far too long. We're just the residents, clearly we don't matter.

After all of this bureaucracy, we were finally told today that the BOD was upholding the DRC's decision. We have wasted several months for the BOD to arrive at the original decision we received from the DRC.

I can live with their decision (I am not happy about it), but I think it is absolute BS that we had to wait 3 months to get it (would have been longer if we hadn't complained)! It seems that if we, as residents, are beholden to these groups to meet to make certain decisions, that those groups should have some form of accountability! Instead, the attitude seems to be "oh well, you can wait until next month". Unfortunately, when multiple groups take on that attitude, residents are forced to wait for an exorbitantly long time to get service.

It seems that the HOA/BOD/whoever, should have a service level agreement that they need to adhere to. This process has been completely ridiculous and I feel that the HOA/BOD customer service leaves a lot to be desired because of it.