Mike Knight — Sunset Hills’ Director of Planning and Public Works — took the floor at the city’s Feb. 10 Board of Aldermen meeting to lead a short discussion about private streets. City staff has recently been exploring ways to collaborate with local homeowners’ associations (HOAs) that are responsible for the maintenance of private streets, ensuring that those private streets get the care and attention they might need.
Knight was looking for a general, informal consensus from the aldermen on whether he should pursue the further development of this idea. At the moment, he says this initiative is “still the beginning stages of the idea” and “conceptual.”
This collaborative initiative would connect city staff with Sunset Hills HOAs or associated property owners who care for private streets. The city would be able to provide information and resources necessary for street maintenance projects: contractors that have worked in Sunset Hills in the past, expected price ranges and example contract language used in city projects.
“While the city has no obligation to maintain these roadways, recent discussion has brought forward that some associations may lack institutional knowledge related to roadway condition assessment, maintenance timing, contractor selection and economy of scale,” Knight stated in a memo to the Board of Aldermen.
With this collaboration, HOAs could also request that city staff conduct “periodic, visual-only observations” of the private streets in question. These observations would be limited to surface conditions; there would be no testing done on the roadway. City staff would then write a brief summary of their observations, adding any “general maintenance considerations the city typically monitors on public streets.”
The city would not be responsible for anything beyond that point, such as selecting a contractor or collecting funds. All payment would be done through contracts between the HOAs and contractors.
“This concept is intended to provide private street owners with tools, awareness and access to information, while maintaining a clear distinction between public infrastructure responsibilities and private ownership obligations,” Knight’s memo stated.
The board expressed a general interest in further development of this concept at its Feb. 10 meeting. An initial implementation phase could be coming soon, in which the city reaches out and hosts informational meetings with interested HOAs. More information will likely be shared with the Sunset Hills community in the forthcoming months.
“Even just the inspection component alone could be valuable, because the average resident — outside of a glaring hole in the ground — doesn’t know what to look for,” Ward 2 Alderman Casey Wong said. “They don’t know that, by the way, a couple years from now you could have a more expensive problem.”
