Then, Now, and Moving Forward

Our beloved neighborhood is made up of 1,134 homes.

That's a lot.

    When you look at the average number of people per household in our area, you are looking at a population in our neighborhood that is comparable to an entire town! (If we were to somehow add a store or two, we could be a town. We already have a school, after all!)

Data from Point2Homes.com

    Not unlike a town, we have a political climate. We have elected leaders. We have people with widely different views and ideas about what is best for the community. And lately, this political climate has been changing.

I think it has been changing for the better.

Hear me out:

    When Belz, the developer who built the neighborhood, started his endeavor over thirty years ago, he had a vested interest in protecting his investment. He had HOA documents drawn up that, in short, gave him all of the power and the say-so over the Board and in the neighborhood, until all the properties were sold. While he was still developing the area, that made perfect sense; there's no reason to risk anything happening to such a massive project before the project is even finished. However, this climate of total control persisted, and until last year, was the fabric of our Board of Directors for far too long.

Photo Credit: C. Draper

    The Board had been a “good old boy's club” for as long as I can remember. We had a group of people who would sit those seats for years and years, to the point where some of them became entitled to the position. (Read Paul Westphal's posted bio this year; he describes his being voted out last year as an “unfortunate absence” as if he is entitled to step back into the role whenever he chooses). They developed an attitude of “we know everything and the homeowners know nothing,” as if they are the only ones who are capable of making good decisions for the neighborhood, and the rest of us can't be trusted with so much as a shred of responsibility.

    This went so far to the extreme that they even started meeting in off-the-record “executive committee” meetings, excluding not only the homeowners, but other board members! We as homeowners were lucky if we heard about the decisions they made on our behalf months after, if we heard about them at all. And it was near impossible to change, because it was near impossible to get a ticket into the “good old boy's club,” good luck getting elected without a sitting Board member's favor.

    Then, in 2022, the entire “good old boy's club” system was finally brought out of the shadows. We finally saw all of the things they didn't want us to see.

We as a community demanded change, but change isn't always pretty.

    Indulge me in a metaphor if you will: your room is a mess, and you've been asked to clean it, so you stuff everything in the closet. The room now looks clean. But your mother has finally wised up to your cleaning methods, and opens the closet. Now, in an almost cartoonish fashion, everything you have been trying to hide has tumbled from the closet! The resulting pile looks even more disastrous than before!

Image credit: clipart-library.com, used under license

We, as a community, opened Riverwood's proverbial closet.

    The good news? Now that everything is out in the open, we can finally start cleaning. Really cleaning. Truly tackling the issues that have been stuffed in the closet for years.

    The bad news? This initial stage of finally cleaning is the stage where it looks the most chaotic. Everything is out in the open, and it's a lot.

    As a neighborhood, are we where we want to be? Not yet. Not even close. But the previous system has had years to pack that closet full, and we have only just had a chance to start cleaning. However, if you take a moment and look back at this past year, you can see the progress, and the momentum building. (More on that in a future blog post). We are, slowly but surely, moving Riverwood forward.

    I have said that Riverwood has its own miniature political system, and it is a unique one. Thank goodness it is not like our political system at a national level. Here in our community, we are not trapped into lesser-of-two-evils voting. There is no reason for us to go back to the old system, and the Board of Directors, we had before. Truly we can't afford to go backward; the world around us is changing and we, as a community, have to adapt. But we also don't have to be content with where we are now. We must continue making progress.

We must continue moving Riverwood Forward