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Monday, April 16, 2007

Senior CIC Issues

Senior CIC Issues

While these issues face all residents of CIC there are specially hard on seniors because many seniors are on fixed incomes. Moreover the growing expenses in running a CIC and the typical burden of having to pay increased mediacal bills Senior CIC are not making the repairs or replacing worn out infrastructure –which can lead to the community losing value and in some cases the resident are forced out because of housing code violations.

Many CIC were never established with an adequate reserve budget to begin with so couple with the fixed income issue of many elder residents this problem is compounded. Responsibility to repair of common property falls on the residents not the county or city government. A special assessments to bring Reserve funds up to adequate levels would be the pratice but the senior do not have the funds to handle this cost.

We are going to have to come up with low interest loans and access to reverse mortages to help fix these outstand issues.

There is no checklist or schedule on when and why CIC need to make repair on his or her property so senior with limited resources are forced to make decisions without having the facts.

In general there is limited board training and even access to board training; so with the growing complexity of running a CIC seniors face these challenges alone. We do not have one university that offers courses on how to run a CIC.

Many seniors are refusing to serve on their boards, which currently must be an owner or relative of the community. We are going to have to come to some kind of compromise on how these boards are going to be run because all CIC face this issues .

CIC are often run by a “professional property managers” while it is not the overall state of mangers –seniors are most vulnerable to less than professional managers. And managers are not responsible to run the board. Once again there is no oversight of how these managers manage a community.

In the case of Investor owners in CIC they are less likely to approve higher assessments, which may be needed to take care of repairs. Because of their need to maximize profits so we go back to problem 1.

We have both reform and educational issues that all residents in CIC face and these concerns need to be addressed and it appears that we as a society are hoping they will go away because there is not many individuals or groups raising alarms or voicing concern about these issues.

WHERE IS THE SENIOR CITIZEN INTEREST GROUPS WHEN IT COME TO CIC PROBLEMS --THEY HAVE REFUSED TO EVEN TAKE OUR CALLS.

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