Dear editor,
After reading your July 28, 2010 article (It’s not fair, July 28), I can see why local cities and states are going broke. Also has “common sense” disappeared from our society? Why has this situation even gotten to the point it has?
When the Atwater Commons Homeowners Association decided to put in the access road for their homeowners to easily access their own property, who made the decision to connect it to the rear parking lot of CVS and Applebee’s in the first place?
It’s not fair or right for the local taxpayers to absorb maintenance costs of this road.
Unless CVS, Applebee’s and the other tenants of the strip mall agree to pay for maintenance costs for the access road, then the homeowners association should pay to have the road access points closed off to the public and maintain the road they built themselves.
It shouldn’t matter that the Atwater Commons Homeowners Association is complaining that they haven’t sold out all of their available units thus not being able to afford the upkeep of their private road. That’s their problem, not ours. Us taxpayers can not afford in these hard economic times additional taxes to pay for other peoples mistakes.
The builder or homeowners association should have figured this out before building the private road or allowing public usage and charged their homeowners accordingly.
Also, I went to the Lake Orion (village) website and tried to get an email address to let them know how I feel about this subject and couldn’t find any email contact information anywhere on the site.
I wanted to send this same email to Village President Ken Van Portfliet and could not find the information to do so.
-Bruce Mandel
Lake Orion