Batavia City Council approves ‘back-up’ special service area for subdivision

The Batavia City Council approved an ordinance establishing a back-up special service area for the Kirkland Chase Phase Three subdivision at Wind Energy Pass and Wagner Road during its April 18 meeting.

“This is a back-up special service area,” said Community and Economic Development Director Scott Buening. “This is meant to only be activated if the association does not maintain the common areas within the development.”

According to meeting documents, a special service area is “a tax strategy that, when activated, uses a localized tax levy to fund the services and maintenance and maintenance of an area instead of city funding. SSA’s are meant to ensure a homeowner’s association maintains common areas within a property.”

Buening said that the original 2001 annexation agreement of the subdivision included the establishment of a back-up special service area.

“The developer did not do that work, unfortunately, in a timely manner so we were basically just going back and establishing this SSA that was required as part of the annexation agreement,” Buening said.

According to meeting documents, the SSA will only activate if the Kirkland Chase Phase Three subdivision associations fail to maintain common facilities such as shared driveways, accesses or detention ponds. The city would need to hold a new public hearing to activate the SSA.

Buening said that SSA’s are common throughout Batavia.

“We only have two active special services within the community, and we have several dozens of [back-ups] that are in place,” Buening said.

Subdivision residents were notified of the SSA in a letter in February of 2021.

The SSA includes a mix of townhomes and single-family homes, each with their own separate homeowner’s association, said Kirkland Chase Phase Three resident Craig Mirsky.

“If the townhome owner’s association, which we have zero part of, if that fails, then we’re on the hook both for the detention ponds as well as what we pay for our regular single-family homeowners association,” Mirsky said. “That really doesn’t seem fair to us for something that we absolutely have zero control over.”

The activated SSA would impose a levy of $0.50 per $100 of equalized assessed property valuation.

“The $0.50 per $100 is a pretty standard number for special service areas. That’s the maximum that we could ever levy,” Buening said. “We can only by law actually levy our actual expenditures on a special service area.”

“It is just a back-up,” said Alderman Alan Wolff. “It is really something that’s important to have so we don’t get into a situation where say a homeowner’s association fails, and then it drives down the values of the properties around it because it doesn’t get maintained.”