St Louis Post Dispatch, July 17, 2024

After an HOA board member saw the goats, she virtually headbutted the homeowner.

The weed-munching crew wasn’t allowed, she wrote in a letter. The goats had to be gone in three days or there would be fines. And, the homeowner needed to pick up their manure.

It’s not surprising that a homeowners association in Maryland Heights wouldn’t allow livestock. But the goats were two-week temps. They were there on a job.

A goat eats the weeds on in an enclosed area next to the greenhouses at Baisch & Skinner wholesale flowers company in St. Louis where they were being used for urban cleaning. Companies sometimes rent out goats to clear yards of weeds.

Post-Dispatch

“They had been rented to clear weeds,” says Laura Fisher, a neighbor of the goats’ employer. The ruminants were from a licensed business allowed by the city. A sign in the front yard alerted passersby to “landscape clearing.”

The neighborhood kids “loved them,” said Fisher, and “it was an environmentally friendly thing to do.”

As for picking up manure: Goats produce pellets not much bigger than rabbits’, and the waste could enrich the land.

In other words, the HOA board member seemed to overreact without asking the homeowner what was going on. And instead of making nice, the board sent a follow-up letter telling the homeowner to ask permission first next time.

The Autumn Lakes association in Maryland Heights has bickered about various issues between house and condo owners and board members for more than a year. But it’s not alone: Homeowners throughout the metro area complain about what some say are illogical rules — or board interpretations —that have responsible adults reduced to fighting over issues like children in a playground.

•      - In St. Charles County, some New Town owners need to ask permission of the community’s Architectural Review Board if they want to install a weathervane. Don’t try with molded plastic chairs, though: They’re banned from front porches.
•      - In South County, an HOA tore out attractive landscaping for one condo building because the others didn’t have any.
•      - In St. Peters, a homeowner was fined for having a trash can out on a Friday (regular trash pickup was delayed for Thanksgiving).
•       - In Creve Coeur, a resident who drove a company truck had to park outside his condo complex. Vehicles with company logos were banned. Another resident, bringing her husband home from the hospital, was chastised for parking in one of multiple visitor spaces in front of her condo. HOAs are meant to maintain community standards, cohesiveness and home values. But for all the good they do, there are plenty of stories of angry fights. Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger recounted earlier this year a squabble involving backyard softball pitching lessons.
  
  

In the goat-averse Maryland Heights HOA, homeowners can no longer burn wood in their fireplaces. Many bought condos under the normal assumption that fireplaces were used to build wood fires. But when the board had to find a new insurance company, it turned out that wood fires were too costly, so their current policy prohibits it.

Its new rules state no wood burning and no gas grills stored on decks or used within 10 feet of a building. The gas grills, ironically, must be stored in garages (fire departments often discourage keeping propane tanks in closed spaces).

Fisher suggested a grill could be stored near a building with a cover to show it wasn’t being used, but she says she was told the board had already made its decision.

“That’s the kind of silliness and short-sightedness we face,” Fisher says. “They don’t necessarily know how to deal with complex issues and don’t take the time to ask the community for ideas.” Other residents in the complex have complained that they are not allowed to sit in their driveway in a lawn chair (one was doing so while protesting a board member’s actions).

Construction takes place on a vacant space in New Town on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2020, in St. Charles. In New Town, residents can get the best of both worlds with the community’s big-city location with a small-town feel. The popular housing development and others like it have continued to expand and attract new homeowners as the metropolitan St. Louis continues to decrease in population.

Lexi Browning

Rules galore are a hallmark of New Town, a planned community in St. Charles County. Certainly, it resembles a charming Main Street at Disneyland. But that charm comes with restrictions ranging from a ban on mailboxes (mail goes to a community area) to making sure basketball hoops and playsets in backyards aren’t visible from community streets.

The Architectural Review Board has power over approving things from hot tubs to roofing and even landscaping flora, its online guidelines say. Holiday decorations are limited to 45 days before a holiday and must be taken down within 30 days after the holiday.

Bridget Allen of St. Peters also lives in a community where HOAs ban swimming pools and basketball hoops that can be seen from community streets. She got a fine because her Bellemeade house’s fenced yard contained a quick-set, above-ground pool: She fought it because the street was officially outside the neighborhood. “We also have a rule that you cannot store trash cans outside of your house,” Allen says. Her family got a warning once when a trash can was left outside too long, so afterward she made sure it was always put away after trash pickup.

But one day, a $50 fine was levied because of a trash can error. After Allen challenged the fine and asked the date of the misdeed, she was told by the management company it was the day after Thanksgiving — trash day had been moved from Thursday to Friday.

After threats of a lien on her house, what really riled her, however, was how long it took the fine to be dismissed. Allen said it wasn’t dismissed for months.

When she was told last summer that she had two weeks to take her pool down, she replied: “Because it took you five months to remove a fine from my account, I’m going to assume that I have five months to correct this.”

A common flare for disagreement involves whether an HOA or homeowner pays for a repair.

For Laurie Finkenkeller in South County, bad gutters on her condo led to water in her storage area and then mold. The HOA said it wouldn’t pay for remediation, even after it had paid for mold in a different building from another kind of leak.  “I have friends who are lawyers, and they said, ‘It’s going to be in court forever. You’d be better off just paying it and getting the mold out of there.’”

She and her husband have lived in their condo for 38 years and at times have wanted to move: “We were very, very upset because sometimes they fix stuff for other people but don’t fix stuff for you.”

In another instance, her husband, a master gardener, planted some bushes, trees and flowers around the building because the HOA was relying on owners to gussy up the exteriors. Later, another board decided their building didn’t look similar to the other buildings: “They pulled out half of our stuff,” Finkenkeller says. “They wanted everything to look uniform, but then they didn’t have the money to do it.”

The area now has a good board getting things done, she says. It asked residents to designate a building captain to identify the most pressing issues. “They have tried to make it fair.”

Susan Kettenbrink, who lives in Parkway Gardens in Creve Coeur, has seen both sides of the HOA wars.  “When I first moved here, I could not understand why the board members were so hardnosed about all the rules; I thought they were obnoxious about it. The four board members seemed to be the only ones who cared, and they were certainly the only ones calling out residents.”  She points to a “nastygram” over weeds in her front courtyard. “I did not think there was anything wrong with how it looked, and my first reaction was to be mad about them coming at me so aggressively rather than sending a nice letter reminding me of the rules and asking that I get it taken care of. Save the ‘nastygrams’ for people who ignore the nice warning.”  Kettenbrink also heard complaints about parking issues like the ones mentioned earlier. So, she decided that maybe she could make a difference as a board member. It, like those on most HOA boards, was a volunteer position.  “Then I shocked myself by suddenly feeling like it was my duty to spot all the infractions and to justify the rules to my neighbors. The instant I went onto the board, I found myself suddenly feeling responsible for whether residents were following the rules.”  She says of an HOA board’s challenge:  “There is the responsibility that comes with the position — a feeling that if I don’t do something about this, no one will.”  Still, she understands the tension on both sides: “There is something about having random neighbors holding the power to put you on the spot and fine you that makes residents want to come out fighting. They get all lawyerly trying to find a loophole in the rules or prove the rules aren’t being applied equally.”