A Message From Board Member Woody Savage

Woodson "Woody" Savage has been a Riverwood Farms Resident for 33 Years, and has served our beautiful neighborhood as a 2023/2024 HOA Board Member (He is currently halfway through his two-year term.) This is a message he sent from his personal email, so many neighbors may have received it, but I would like to add my own thoughts as well (which I will do in Blue, to save on confusion)

Here is the email:

The current HOA Board would like to thank you for your support. We hope you can attend this year’s meeting as it will be located adjacent to our subdivision at our own neighborhood elementary school.

Riverwood Farms HOA Annual Meeting

Thursday, November 16, 2023 – 6 PM

Riverwood Elementary School Auditorium

(Use Front Entrance)

There are six positions open on the HOA Board of nine directors. Please consider these three candidates for our Board of Directors:

Here are some of our HOA Board Accomplishments/Activities in 2023:

Macon Road East Perimeter Fence … we determined that our HOA was liable for perpetual maintenance of this fence as the fence was originally installed in 2005 within our HOA Shrubbery right-of-way. Cedar Fence cost $57,600.

For reference, the HOA has an annual budget of around $600,000, and previous boards in previous years spent over $120,000 to repaint the brick entrance. The perimiter fence sounds like a whole lot more "bang for your buck" to me.

Memorial Garden with Bench near Gimel to honor residents.

Refurbished Bayside East Sign on Riverwood Farms Pkwy

I wish we had before-and-after photos to go here. The needed repairs had been ignored for years, and I'm so grateful this was finally handled by this board.

On-going routine maintenance for erosion control and repair around the lake, removal of beavers damaging our trees, storm damage limb/tree removal as required, still searching for a permanent solution to our drainage canal maintenance, pothole repairs on Dexter ln. alley, etc

Sponsor Home Beautification contest, food truck weekends, introduce new first annual “Trunk or Treat” Halloween event.

Trunk-or-Treat was a blast! The fact that it doubled as a "Meet the Candidates" event is even better! I'm so grateful to see the pattern of silencing the "opposition" has finally ended!

Aside from all that, I don't think I have seen a better turnout for a community event in a very long time! I call that a success all the way around!

Riverwood Farms decorations for major holidays…Memorial Day, July 4th, Halloween, and the Christmas season.

2023 Annual HOA Dues collection shortfall now stands at $34,330 ($561,019 collected so far); our DRM law firm has collected $69,710 on our behalf for mostly prior years' past due dues/fees/fines from 65 different residents through October of this year.

Read that carefully: uncollected dues, under the direction of previous boards, were allowed to carry over unaddressed. Under the current board, we're finally starting to see it handled!

Developing a new Riverwood Farms website to better promote our HOA and why Riverwood Farms is the best place to live in Memphis and Shelby County.

This is in keeping with their pledge to financial responsibility: our previous web host was not providing the promised value for what we were paying them, so another vendor was found who is providing more value and more service at a lower cost.

A surprising amount of research goes into many of our projects and issues as we focus on our goals to keep costs down and to better serve our Riverwood Farms Community. We encourage each resident to consider volunteering for some of our committees and activities so we can better promote our neighborhood. Also, thanks to Wright, Echo, Ambassador and DRM for their ongoing vendor support and to our new vendor VytoCor Web Solutions!

Thanks,

Woody Savage

P.S. Please return your ballot via mail or email ASAP if there is any chance you will be unable to attend our annual meeting. Note: As of Nov 6, less than 30 people out of 1,134 homeowners had sent in their ballot!