Annual meeting - Covenant revisions

Proposed Hamilton Creek Covenant Revision

Our Covenants were written and approved in 1986.  Since then there have been many changes in Colorado law so that we are out of compliance.  The biggest change since 1986 is the passage of the Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act (CCIOA) that specifies many things that an HOA must do for managing the HOA and providing information to owners, as well as getting owner approval of the covenants.

Our goal is to bring the Covenants into compliance with current law, eliminate clauses that are no longer important to the continued maintenance of HC as a superb mountain community, and to simplify them as much as possible so that future revisions become less necessary.

Our current Declaration of Covenants may be amended with an instrument signed by all the first mortgagees and holders of first deeds of trust and signed by the Owners of not less than 75% of the Sites, and then it must be recorded by the County Clerk before it will be binding on the Owners.

The current amendment provision is trumped by CCIOA in relation to the percentage of owners needed to amend (CCIOA caps it at 67%), but we do still need to go through the mortgagee approval process.  In our revision we’re amending the Covenants to comply with the CCIOA cap of 67% and to eliminate the burdensome mortgagee approval that is not required by Colorado law.  To comply with CCIOA and the 67% approval, we need 81 votes approving the amendment.  Please take the time to review the Covenants and when you receive your ballot by mail after the annual meeting, please support what we have done by signing it and returning it so your vote is counted.

Examples of changes we made: 

• There are many references to the Declarant (the people who developed Hamilton Creek and filed the current Covenants) and this entity no longer exists and has no relevance to HC as it is today. The rights of the Declarant have expired, such as the right to appoint the architectural review committee, so all references to the Declarant have been deleted.  These duties are now part of the obligations of the Board of Directors.
• Use of signs and flags will be permitted consistent with Colorado law
• Ability to conduct a business at home will be permitted as long as it doesn’t change the residential nature of our neighborhood or conflict with any other covenants
• Size and types of antennas allowed was not in compliance with current FCC regulations in relation to satellite dishes
• Owners were prohibited from having a Homestead Exemption and we deleted this prohibition

During the Annual Meeting on July 9 we’d like to answer any questions you might have about the proposed revision. In order to be efficient with our time during the meeting, it would be helpful if you’d submit your questions beforehand so that we can be prepared to address them.  Please submit them to [email protected] by July 1 so that we can prepare to answer as many questions as possible at the annual meeting.  We’ll mail out ballots for your votes soon after the meeting.

The current covenants and the proposed revised covenants are in the links below.