Trails III & IV Homeowners Association

Saturday Evening, December 22nd, the Trails 3 & 4 panel of judges (your board of directors, and their families and friends) toured the Christmas lights displays throughout The Trails. You will recall reading in the most recent Trails Newsletter, that we’re awarding $100 Lowe’s gift cards to the top three lights displays throughout Trails 3 & 4. Among the many great displays that caught our attention, we honor these:

1311 North 87th Place

These homeowners work hard to present a great display, year after year. We especially noticed the PowerPoint show on their garage door.

8728 East Portland Street

8703 East Portland Street

Like many homeowners, the folks at 8703 enjoy adding a few new items each year to their presentation.

We also wanted to show our ‘honorable mentions,’ but between two photographers, several of the images blurred. Tell you what — next year let’s all plan to get more lights and themes in our yards, and the judges’ photographers will bring along their tripods.

Congratulations again to this year’s winners, and to everyone who worked hard to put out a great display.

Lots of good food was on hand …

Lots of Trails neighbors, too.

The party filled the cul-de-sac most of the evening.

Lots of new friendships were formed throughout The Trails

The face painting clowns were a hit!

The kids had fun checking-out the engine when Scottsdale Fire Department came around. Hard to know who enjoyed it more, the kids or the fire fighters.

They’ve been posted for a couple weeks. While the scary-looking all-seeing eye likely won’t likely have much power for running off the Bad Guys, there is something that will. And YOU possess it.

As the sign says, “We look out for each other.” Professional thieves “case” their targets before they strike. If they see people around; people who look like they’re alert and watching out for who belongs in the neighborhood and who doesn’t, the professionals will move on to more opportune targets. So one way to help is to keep an observing eye on someone who appears not to be a Trails resident.

Here’s something else that might interest you. We’re having another Block Watch meeting at the Granite Reef Senior Center (just off the NW corner of McDowell and Granite Reef Rd behind the AM/PM market) Thursday, October 25th, from 7:30 - 8:30 p.m.

A City of Scottsdale Police detective will be at the meeting to discuss a topic of great importance to our neighborhood — especially, though not exclusively — for anyone who is a parent. More details at the meeting. Come and have dessert with us!

So our newsletters hit mailboxes yesterday, and if you’ve taken a look, you’ve seen four or five places where we stamped our new web address.  Turning to your computer, you came to see.  See what, exactly?  Not much, until now.  And candidly, still not much.  But hang on  — we’re gradually getting the hang of this thing, speaking of hanging.

 As you’re probably aware, serving with the homeowners’ association is completely voluntary.  Unlike Congress, your beloved board doesn’t get to vote itself regular pay raises.  Nor do we throw money around for professional site development.  This is your president’s O-J-T for a number of other sites he wishes to develop for actual revenue-producing purposes.

 If you’ve ever taken a look at our previous site, you’ll probably agree that this is already an improvement.  Here’s what to look for in the near term …

1) A continuation of the newsletter article regarding property and paint variances, including a color picture of the house that was discussed therein (as soon as I learn “FTPing” graphics and documents from my office to the site host.

2) Sidebar postings of our constitution, bylaws, architectural standards and such, where they’re more readily accessible.  Sometimes we get calls: “How do I obtain an architectural variance?”  They too will be posted on the site.

3) Better means of contact.  We’ll add e-mail forwarding capabilities to make it far easier for homeowners to communicate to the appropriate persons.  Questions about a bill or statement?  Before long you’ll more easily know where to turn.

4) Better means of communication.  We’ll be able to provide you more frequent and hopefully useful communication, vs. a quarterly newsletter as our main voice.  Hard to know for sure, but we estimate 80% of our homeowners are online, whether at home or work.  We DO know for sure that whatever the percentage actually is, it increases each year.

5) Better discussion, and hopefully better community.  When we figure out how to enable the comments section, we’ll have the capability for an online community forum.    Hopefully every reader will find the discussion interesting and informative.

 More later.  Please check back often.  It’s my intent to get more content posted every day until we achieve our vision of what this site can be.