You may wonder why you’re paying your VCA assessment every quarter. This article won’t outline all of the expense areas of the Association, but one substantial expense that our assessments pay for is landscape maintenance. On one hand, we as members of VCA are very fortunate to have eleven fantastic parks we can enjoy and numerous acres of landscaped common areas that beautify our community and enhance our property values.
On the other hand, our excellent parks with a wide array of recreational amenities and other common areas require constant maintenance that is paid for by our assessments. You may ask what this maintenance entails. If a complete list of landscape duties performed by our contracted maintenance firm AAA Landscaping were to be included in the article, it would likely be too lengthy for our newsletter, but let’s look at just a few maintenance responsibilities for which our assessments pay.
Some obvious tasks that you may have noticed are mowing and trimming the park grass, tree and shrub trimming and cleaning the parks and other common areas. Other tasks performed that may be less obvious are things such as irrigation maintenance and repair, plant and turf fertilization, pesticide and fungicide treatment, plant/tree removal and installation, drainage maintenance, park trash removal and grass over-seeding.
As previously noted, the above list of landscape tasks is condensed yet you may be able to tell that just from reviewing those tasks needed to maintain our parks and common areas, the cost is substantial. Although a good part of our VCA assessment is necessarily allocated for landscape maintenance, the distinct probability is the enjoyment we receive, and the property value enhancement created by our parks and common areas more than offset the cost of maintenance.