More dollars burned...

Continued from A penny saved is a dollar burned...

6.  $21,600  The money the Sutherlands have spent to have our community Intranet hosted with WebEx and the most expensive options package they had.  Never mind that nearly all of the money spent for those features was for naught, as everything that would have made it a truly useful resource for homeowners necessarily also enabled them to sometimes criticize the Sutherland Board - and Kit wasn't going to have that - not for a minute.

Fix for all Phase II parking garage problems finally identified

It seems like the problems – and cost to remedy them – surrounding the Phase II parking garage never seem to end. Specifically:

1. Every effort to prevent birds from building nests in the insulation and spreading diseases and mold as a consequence has failed and birds continue to damage the property and leave behind copious droppings on people and their cars; 
2. The third floor lofts located above the second floor of the parking garage are adversely impacted during cold weather as the thin layer of patchwork insulation is insufficient to enable those units to maintain warmth; 
3. Cold weather has also necessitated the purchase and installation of an elaborate web of plug-in electric pipe heaters to prevent the exposed plumbing that snakes along the ceiling of the second floor parking level from freezing and bursting (potentially raining raw sewage onto everyone and everything below...yuk!) during winter months – driving up utility expenses for a ticking time bomb solution that has no way of being monitored for the mechanical failures that are inevitable as the heat strips age;
4. The northern and western sides of the first floor parking level serve as lawsuit in-waiting as there is no barrier to prevent a small child – or pet – from suffering as much as a ten foot free fall from the grass to the pavement floor of the garage below. While it is unclear if the lack of a barrier violates building codes, the Blog has confirmed that the deficiency would prevent our property from passing a housing safety inspection by the Atlanta Housing Authority; 
5. The lack of personal and property security inherent in the parking garages has been a persistent source of very vocal complaints from homeowners for the past nine years as their cars have been broken into repeatedly and a few have even been stolen from the property outright. 

CART-GATE

Dear Neighbors:

The Blog recently donated a brand new cart for homeowner use, since they always seem to be in short supply.  Fully knowing that Kit Sutherland would sooner take it away and deprive every one of its use than she would have anyone who doesn’t already know about the Blog find out about it, we installed an RFID tag on the cart so that when it went missing, we would know who took it – and that would be unit 519, Andrew Mark Hicks.

But you know Kit – being a bit of a tech-not (by her own admission), she didn’t know what an RFID tag was and became convinced it was some sort of sinister plot to upset the security of our community, and sent out the (somewhat embarrassing) e-mail, below.  (Continued...)

SAFETY ALERT! Many GIL lofts at risk for fire

VERY REAL DANGER  Most GIL homeowners are probably blithely unaware that their loft has a serious construction defect that substantially increases the probability of having a potentially devastating house fire.  Although the Blog has not been able to determine how the Glen Iris developer, Miller-Gallman, was able to skirt the local building code and slide the defect past city building inspectors, the dryer venting assembly of every loft we inspected was found to be in substantial violation of the local building code. (Continued...)