The annual meeting of Weybridge Homeowners Association, Inc. is scheduled for Tuesday, October 11 starting at 7:00 p.m., held at the Country Club at Muirfield Village. All residents are encouraged to attend. Here’s the address:
6:30 p.m. — Residents can enjoy light appetizers, lemonade, coffee, tea, and a cash bar for any soft drinks or alcohol you might like to purchase. You can use this time to say hello to familiar neighbors, get to know new neighbors, and find a seat for the meeting.
7:00 p.m. — The current Board of Trustees will conduct the annual meeting. There will be live reports from Board members and volunteers. We’ll share the proposed 2023 annual budget and see how 2022 has gone so far. Next year we’ll have our periodic drive re-sealing, and we can check in on things like landscaping, remodeling procedures, newsletter and website updates, and more.
There’s not a set time for the meeting to end, but we typically see the meeting run about 1 hour, maybe a little more if there are lots of questions.
Sadly, we live in times when criminals have computers just like the rest of us, and they sometimes use these digital tools to steal from us normal folks.
One of the ways Internet thieves do this is a method called “phishing” — where they send email, text messages, or other electronic communications that impersonate someone else and ask the targets (you) to do something for the impersonated person. They “hook” their victims (like a fish) and reel them in. Targets of the attack might be asked to wire money, buy gift cards, turn over passwords, or visit a website that breaks into their computer or online accounts to steal information.
We’ve recently learned attackers have impersonated members of the Weybridge board (and possibly other volunteers) and sent email to other board members and in some cases to residents, asking the recipients to buy things or wire money. These emails are fake, but they may look like they’re from a Weybridge board member, based on the way they forge the return email address.
PLEASE NOTE: Weybridge board members, volunteers, or anyone else associated with Weybridge will never email residents asking for money, gift cards, access to your PC, or anything else. The only “ask” is that you pay quarterly dues of $200 to the HOA. Any other request is invalid and should be ignored and deleted.
We will also remind everyone about this risk next week at the Weybridge Annual Meeting (Tue, Oct 11), and make it a topic we mention at least annually, to remind everyone and inform new residents.
If you’ve got questions about phishing attacks and how you might be at risk, feel free to contact weybridgeweb@gmail.com (board member John Proffitt) for more info.
After nearly 8 years of reliable Weybridge newsletter editing and distribution, Bill Campbell is retiring from his volunteer post, and we cannot thank him enough for his service! Bill also served on the Weybridge board for 2 years along the way.
This means we need a new volunteer editor for The Bridge, which residents may remember is published 4 times per year in March, June, September, and December. You can find our archive of past issues here.
Since 2020 the newsletter has been primarily released via email, along with dues reminders and occasionally a plot map or resident directory. About 85% of Weybridge residents receive The Bridge this way. For the 15% that may struggle with electronic communications, Bill has dutifully printed and mailed the newsletter and other materials to those residents each quarter.
Could you be our next newsletter editor? Yes!In brief, here’s a summary of the job:
Collect articles, documents, and photos — mostly from Board members
Edit the articles and design the content to fit into a 2-page newsletter format, using tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, or similar apps
Print about a dozen copies of the documents and mail them to our non-electronic residents
Create electronic (PDF) copies of the newsletter and other documents and email them to a list of addresses maintained by the Weybridge board, using a special email account just for the newsletter editor
Bill estimates he spends about 8 hours every 3 months preparing and publishing everything.
If you’re willing to volunteer as our new publisher, the next issue of The Bridge is due around December 15, and Bill is ready to hand over files and help you get started.
BrightView will be back in the Weybridge neighborhood next week to aerate our lawns for the fall season. At present they expect to do the work on Monday or Tuesday, October 3 or 4.
Lawn aeration pokes deep holes in the lawn and can damage wiring for invisible fences, lighting, and sprinklers, or anything else buried in the yard.
Please mark any underground systems like invisible fences, landscape lighting, and sprinkler heads to prevent accidental damage. You can place lawn flags to map out where the aerators should not go.
During the growing season this year, Weybridge residents may have noticed special requests for landscaping — which we collected in Landscaping Questionnaires over the winter — have not been consistently honored. Our Landscape Co-Chairs Cate Monks and Karen Vincent recently investigated and discovered why.
Our property manager, Kevin, is no longer with BrightView. So we attended a meeting with our BrightView area and account managers to ask why our special requests have not been consistently fulfilled. They expressed surprise that individual homeowner requests had been accepted in the first place or even honored over the last few years.
Our contract
It turns out the contract does not include per-property custom services, and our former contact Kevin was not authorized to agree to any such requests.
The contract with BrightView calls for a variety of services for Weybridge properties — mowing, leaf pickup, chemical applications, aerating, pruning, and so forth. But the services are designed to be universal across all properties. From BrightView’s perspective, Weybridge is one large customer, not 80 individual customers.
This explains why we’ve been able to maintain such low quarterly dues for so many years — in some cases half the cost of nearby properties — the services are provided at scale. When asked what it would cost for BrightView to honor per-property landscaping requests, they estimated the contract would at least double in price.
How did this happen?
We’re not entirely sure how we got here, but it appears to be a good-faith misunderstanding, where BrightView’s representative (Kevin) offered assurances in a “gentleman’s agreement” to provide the additional services, but the underlying contract was not modified to include the additional work. The agreements made in person were not backed up by the contract language — and we simply missed it. Meanwhile, Kevin appeared to be able to maintain some level of custom services over the past few years… right up until the pandemic, when staffing problems hit BrightView and other “front line” service companies.
We understand this is a disappointment to all residents that asked for special landscaping adjustments, and we apologize for the misunderstanding. But we hope you’ll consider the upside of a low-cost dues approach with fairly good landscaping results most of the time (albeit with occasional mistakes).
Looking ahead / Collecting feedback
At this point, the BrightView landscaping contract covers the rest of 2022 and runs through 2023 and 2024. The Weybridge Board would like resident feedback on what — if any — changes residents would like to explore in terms of the contract, with the understanding that contract termination or expansion would incur additional costs that would return to residents in the form of higher dues.
You can email our Landscaping volunteers Cate Monks and Karen Vincent at weybridgelandscape@gmail.com or you can post a message via our Contact Us page on the website.
We have only one request. Please keep in mind Board members and other volunteers are not compensated in any way for our time and we are your literal neighbors, so civility is appreciated.
Weybridge Homeowners Association 
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