There's a national level emergency event planned are Condo & Hoa's included

National Level Exercise 2011 (NLE 2011) is scheduled for May 2011. The purpose of the exercise is to prepare and coordinate a multiple-jurisdictional integrated response to a national catastrophic event.

NLE 2011 is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise. Tier I exercises (formerly known as the Top Officials exercise series or TOPOFF) are conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), which serves as the nation’s overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises. The NEP was established to provide the U.S. government, at all levels, exercise opportunities to prepare for catastrophic crises ranging from terrorism to natural disasters.

NLE 2011 is a White House directed Congressionally-mandated exercise that includes the participation of all appropriate federal department and agency senior officials, their deputies and staff; and key operational elements. NLE 2011 will focus on regional catastrophic response and recovery activities between federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants.

Click for more information. 

If you interested in getting your community involved please visit our website and register so we can include your community.

International Community Association 

Distributed Generation Workshop “Generating electricity near where it will be used”

Distributed Generation Workshop “Generating electricity near where it will be used”

Saturday, May 7th 2011

9-130 pm

Walter E. Washington Convention Center

Come to learn about how we can together reduce our utility bills and make DC just a bit greener.

Question for DC At Large Candidates~ Do you or don't you support.

To learn more please look at a blog post we published way back in 2007 about this which means this has been brewing for years and no one has done a thing accept pass the ball on the owners that brought homes in these communities.

State of Communities: Beware of the Ides of March in CIC land.

State of Communities: Beware of the Ides of March in CIC land.: "So if you think about the state of the condominium market right now with both FHA & Fannie Mae basically not able to back loans in what 100 ..."

Community Manager Project: We sent our plan to Startup America

Community Manager Project: We sent our plan to Startup America: "So Friday Feb 11th we where able to pitch our idea to several officials while attending a Tech@State event at the State Departme..."

DC Electric: District Public Service Commission Pepco hearing T...

DC Electric: District Public Service Commission Pepco hearing T...: "We have to start with the fact that Pepco doesn’t recognize homeowner & townhouse associations as a Party of Rights*. This is evident by loo..."

Storm Water Ponds are back! Everyone run it's an unfunded mandate.

This caught our eye and we know what has to be done and why is it won't be solved in Maryland or any other State anytime soon.   In the 1999 Clean Water Act there was a provision for Storm Water Management Pond testing and standard levels that must be maintained.    The only problem is that no one ask or even thought for one minute about who owns the majority of them.

Did you guess?  If your read our StateofCommunities.org blog you sure would know the answer.   Common Interest Communities are the owners of these in most cases.  The Congress that decided to establish the testing and maintaining of these ponds~ don't have to pay the bills in these communities.  We're pretty sure that most CIC have no idea about this, most Counties are scrambling to comply with the State's demand, and the FEDs are fining everyone.

Here is the major issue. Almost no one has put all the pieces to the problem together into workable solution.  If the Associations don't have the funds and most will not even have a clue about this issue how are they going to fix them. Another Special Assessment because the Congress stuck them with an UNFUNDED MANDATE

BTW all to often these ponds where already environmental hazards created by the developers. Which once they reach the magic number of units sold leave they get to turnover the community, aka they bugged out. Leaving a new group of homeowners with a lot responsibility including these ponds. The cycle just gones on because of the nature of board turn over,  new local officials and a lack of any communication plan.

BTW the Gov response is to fine them except in the case of Montgomery County and we believe a possible solution.

Way back in 2001 then Montgomery County Chairman Ike Leggett had the vision to put together legislation that allowed the County to fund a program in which the County could enter into an agreements with these communities to take over roles mandated by the Clean Water Act. We recommend that anyone that is serious about cleaning these ponds take a look at it. BTW all new CICs in Montgomery County are required to have this agreement in place.

We think the hallmark of this was a parthership with Community Paperworks and the Department of Environmental Resources. It was established to help with the assembling of the land records, communication to the associations, running meetings to approve the agreements. In some cases extra work is required because the developer many not have deeded the land over to the community or the records where never filed in the first place.

This is something that clearly is still vexing Maryland and every other state and it is time to look into this solution that what  established in Montgomery County and both the International Community Association and Community Paperworks look forward to working with all officials and CICs;  So that Clean Water is not an unfunded mandate and a working solution is co-created.