GRIT Newsletter: April 2025

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Summary

April 2025 GRIT

The April 2025 GRIT began, as most issues do, with the “Message from The President.”  Jim Stewart described the crowd dynamics at the SHHA Annual Meeting on February 22, mentioning that answers to all 44 questions received before the meeting were now posted to the SHHA website. Jim also encouraged readers to attend the Wildfire Response Seminar scheduled by Environment and Safety Committee on April 24. 

Due to increasing interest in wildfire safety, due in part to the devastating California fires earlier this year, Kathleen McCaughey and the Environment and Safety Committee (E&S) posted an update on how homeowners could prepare for wildfires in Sandia Heights, while publicizing the upcoming Wildlfire Response Seminar as well.

The April 2025 issue saw the inaugural publication of a new feature by the Editor, “Board Notes.” This issue’s “Board Notes” covered the annual meeting motions and related discussions in some detail, including a lengthy back-and-forth at the meeting in which the process and rules for electing Board members were clarified. The article continues with mention of Board Goals for 2025, which include a Bylaws revision for clarity and consistency with other governance documents, procedures, and laws; the establishment of a permanent Governance Committee to handle issues like elections and bylaws in the future; and an examination of the unusual legal status of the SHHA, which, though it has “Homeowner’s Association” in its name, was established with its own mandates well before state laws arrived to standardize homeowners’ associations’ structure, roles, responsibilities, and authority.  Three photos of the annual meeting were also published in the April GRIT.  Two showed crowd pictures; one showed a special ceremony in which a rare photo of Sandia Height’s founder, Ben Abruzzo, was presented to the SHHA’s current president.  That photo had been found languishing on eBay and was purchased by long-time resident Ann List as a present to the community.

Moving along in the April 2025 GRIT, the Community Service and Membership Committee (CS&M) published notifications of three of its upcoming events:  an Easter Egg Hunt, a shredding event, and an opening for residents to volunteer for their committee.  The Covenant Support Committee (CSC) followed with an article by Stan Davis, outlining how to submit complaints to Bernalillo County, as not all neighbor disagreements are governed by covenants and thus handled by the CSC.  In particular, zoning (dead vehicles, trailers, trash, weeds, lights) and health-related (noise, sanitation) complaints are handled by the County and not the CSC.

The final “serious” article in the April GRIT was a new installation of the “Artist Next Door” series by Claudia Mitchell.  Evelyn Carter was the featured Sandia Heights artist.  Evelyn began her art career after retiring as a financial analyst.  Her art takes the form of acrylic paintings in which geometry and pattern are fused to convey a metaphorical landscapes, cityscapes, and faces.

While much of the April GRIT’s content was quite heavy, the issue was lightened a bit by the inclusion of two April Fools’ pieces: 1) a fictional letter from a local bear to the Editor, encouraging everyone to make foraging trash as easy and tasty as possible for the bear population and 2) a fictional interview article describing a supposed encounter between a Sandia Heights resident and the over-200-years-old Juan Tabo.  The back page of The GRIT also offered some cheer, with Rudy Schlaf’s photo of Sandia area boulders that mimicked a resting hound dog.

In addition to issue-specific content, the usual monthly reports were sprinkled throughout the April issue: the number of Covenant Support Committee violations and their status; a list of recent Architectural Control Committee approvals, and a short Community Events announcement.