Poa
 

Is the POA now only online or still delivered to your driveway.. They will have a field day with this villages health issue.

I give up. What is the POA? AI says it means power of attorney.

According to the latest newsletter at villagespoa.org, the September bulletin will be the final printed edition.

Exactly!

Apparently, POA stands for Property Owners' Association. Who knew?

This are those annoying newsletters that they toss into your driveway every so often.

Littering if you ask me.

Thankfully they will only be “on line” after Sept.

Anybody that’s read talk of TOTV since 2016.🤦

I didn't know what it meant.

They are the people who sued the developer and got a $45 million settlement for all of us.

I find it of interest.

Exactly!!!
 

It absolutely made my day to hear that this trash will soon only be found online and not be littering our beautiful villages anymore! Hallelujah! I have called, emailed, and requested at their website to please stop throwing this trash on my driveway but every month there it is.

Snowbirds and flakes hate having stuff thrown in their driveway that they didn’t specifically schedule. Nothing tells prospective criminals “no one is currently home” than a bunch of stuff in the driveway that hasn’t been picked up for days.

Sorry, should of said property owners association
 

I’ve been here 20 years so I was assuming most people knew abbreviation. They have done some good things like getting $45 million from the developer for upkeep of rec. centers etc. HOA is homeowners association which never criticizes the developer. They do lots of good things for residents.

Important tidbit about that $45 million - it was the result of a lawsuit, because there was black mold in the Paradise rec center, and they found rats or squirrels (can't remember which, might've been both), living and dead, between the ceiling and the roof of the building. Lots of structural damage, and so on. The building wasn't that old, and the developer refused to do any repairs on the shoddy work. So residents and lawyers got together, formed the POA, and sued the developer - and won.

The POA is the group that looks out for the property owners' best interests. The HOA is the group that looks out for the developer's interests.

Just to clarify, there is no HOA.
There is Villages Homeowners Advocates, that does do many good things.

:agree:

There is no HOA, just a CDD.

And unlike an HOA, the CDD does NOT any have rules, enforce or collect any fines for breaking them, or collect per household monthly dues, like say $199. /sarcasn

The POA $45m win was sometime in 2018 or before....now 7+ years ago. Many new residents since that time know nothing of those events, have no idea what the POA is or what they do, why anyone should join the POA, and now that those newsletters will no longer be in the driveway (to pickup and read or just throw away), will not even be a blip on the radar.

If they honestly do good things as some have said, they desperately need a marketing person.

We fall into that camp. No idea of their history and their big win in 2018.

The only research I did on them is learning how to stop receiving their paper in my driveway.

That’s all for naught now that they’re going online only.

Good on line
 

They deliver to all homes, even if no one home. Away or snowbirds. Bad idea. Glad it’s going on line.

Good neighbors solve this little problem.

I believe the Property Owners Association and old man Harold Schwartz (founder of TV) were agreeable partners in the beginning. If the property owner had a complaint, Harold would get the problem fixed. Then Gary Morse (biological son) took over running things and money seemed more important than customer satisfaction. So when the POA (in their printed publication found in every rec. center) wrote about a problem, Gary broke ties with them and formed the VHA and (like county commissioner seats) filled the VHA with his friends. It was the "Happy Owners" publication. He stopped the POA news from being available in rec. centers, so they went to volunteers to deliver it to driveways. Gary tried to stop that too but with the Daily Sun delivered to driveways too, so he could do little to say newspapers in driveways are trash. He did print the VHA paper for them (free) and delivered it inside the Daily Sun sleeve. He would NOT print the POA paper any more. The Leesburg Daily Commercial newspaper picked that up for a printing fee. Gradually the POA had more homeowner complaints to air and pressured the CDD and the Developer to fix things rather than pushing the cost onto the residents themselves. There were lots of mistakes being thrust onto the homeowners from bad bridges, to flooding, to golf course problems and of course the Paradise Rec. Center deal, where the POA won big time in court. [That should give you some idea of who was right there.]

So you have an organization that tries to speak out for the residents and one that says everything is great here and the developer is a "Big Benevolent Benefactor". So take your pick. Are you on the homeowner's side or the builder's side when you bought here?

Those that have been here 20+ years can fill in more details. I'm all in favor of "checks and balances" in life. And I love living here.

Skip

You've confusing terms.

There is an HOA, but the term means something different here. My sister's community (not in the Villages) has an HOA, but it's $10 a year to join and gives you access to monthly pot-luck parties and a Sunshine fund.

A CDD is a form of government. It's not in the same category.

The monthly fees we all pay are our Amenity fees, which cover many of the things traditional HOAs cover, and don't cover many of the other things HOAs cover.

The HOA here in The Villages is a club you can join, known as the VHA (HOA = Homeowners Association/VHA = Villages Homeowner Advocates which implies that it's an HOA of some sort), but aren't obligated to join, and don't have to pay for if you don't want to join it. It promotes the overall positive spin on The Villages from a marketing standpoint, which means that when there's a problem with homeowners that the HOA feels serves The Villages (as a complete entity) by NOT solving it, it will vote against solving it. When the POA gets involved, they do it in a way that is more likely to favor actually solving the problem.

There needs to be a "community announcement" bulletin board in every recreation center. And the rec centers need to allow the POA to post a monthly summary with the URL or even a QR code to scan for access to their website.

They have a community board at our postal station but it's behind a locked glass window, and there are just emergency info, and notices of "no mail" for holidays, and the phone number for the Rec Center on it.

Just coming up on finishing year 2 owning in TV. Compared to other developers, TV does MUCH more to keep up their properties, even in the oldest sections. Most developers' buildout an area/community and wash their hands of it. I've NEVER seen a developer spend the time and money to keep up older areas (flowers, trees, common areas) to the degree TV does! Are they perfect, no. And, yes, we pay for much of it with maintenance and amenity fees but compared to every other development I've lived in over the past 50 years, TV is much better.

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Property Owners Associaton

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Property Owners Association

Just got the POA paper in the driveway. Not much in it but a lot of advertising.

LOL, you actually had to subscribe online (to unsubscribe) and to say you no longer wanted to get drive way delivery when you never asked for it in your driveway in the first place. I suspect for dong that I was counted as a subscriber (which they claim a large number of). I called the president once to express concern and was told it was a 25 year tradition!

Do they still do stories or is it just ads now?

The POA is an essential newsletter. It is the only organized voice that stands ready to call out the developer on quality of life issues in The Villages. They have done some fabulous work in the past representing us. If you're unsure about what the POA has done, I suggest you look into it as soon as possible. I also put extra stock in their advertisers.

Thanks Skip, I love how you sneak in the comment county commission seats to imply that the developer runs the Sumter county commission. It is a favorite one that POA supporters like to throw into every conversation. However, since you follow the POA so closely you should let people know that 3 of the 5 county commissioners were supported by the POA. So actually the county commissioners are under the POA thumb and not the developer. Agree?

Im sorry, it does not give them the right to just riffle out their paper to every open driveway in the neighborhood and shame on their advertisers for supporting this. My first experience with POA was when I rented a home in Richmond last year. Just before a hurricane came through the POA felt their message and advertisers were so important they delivered on the weekend of a hurricane. Needless to say, papers were everywhere in the streets and storm gutters since Richmond in August is not full of residents. I have found two blown in my back yard of my new home in another neighborhood. I have yet to read it because of this. Cheers.

Those “annoying” news letters are actually a wealth of information to us full time home owners, if one likes to pay attention to their surroundings.

My thought also.

I agree with this. Whenever the POA is brought up, folks want to talk about the lawsuit that happened several years ago. Then they say, 'they do great things for the residents' or ' they look out for the residents'. But they never seem to name specific things.

He gave a good description of what the organization tries to do, and you skipped over everything to find something you could criticize.