The Tellico Village HomeOwners Association reached its highest membership level at year-end 2016, and officers feel optimistic they’ll reach 2,000 households by December.
Recent growth in Tellico Village, coupled with changing demographics, is responsible for last year’s total membership of 1,812 households, Steve McBrien, HOA communications vice president, said.
“There’s several things that happened,” he said. “The organization has become more viewed by a variety of people as a source of information. Second, and equally as important, is the Village has grown. The New Villagers is an organization for people living in the Village for two years or less, which is feeding into the HOA like never before ...
“The final thing is the Village is bigger,” McBrien added. “There were — I think — 30 or 40 new home starts in the Village last year. In addition to that, what’s happening is the original Villagers who moved here when it was founded almost 30 years ago ... their homes are being purchased by new people. The younger folks — younger is a relative term — the people who are relatively in the age demographic of 60-80 are pretty involved in stuff. We’re seeing the replacement of people who are over 90. Those three things are really the foundation of (the growth).”
HOA holds six general meetings throughout the year focusing on specific topics, with February’s meeting focusing on local governance. Bruce Johnson, board president for the Property Owners Association, will present the POA’s “Road Map for 2017 and Beyond.”
“The agendas have to be a little bit topical,” John Borderlon, HOA president, said. “Just about every year this time, we like to get the POA to talk about the year ahead. ... Bruce Johnson will be talking about what’s in the pipeline and what’s going on. Winston Blazer, the general manager, will talk about the staff.”
Additional upcoming meeting topics include recreation investment, housing trends and neighborhood security, while highlighting other important issues for Villagers.
“Generally, we like to give enough of an advance notice to build enough information on it and get the key speakers we need,” Borderlon said.
February’s meeting will include time for people to comment and ask questions.
“It helps the community here when a homeowner is actively involved and are advocating for what they want,” McBrien said. “We’re going to have a general meeting coming up shortly when the new president of the POA will come to the community and talk about what his plans are for the current year. He will talk about possible plans for a medical facility here, which is going to be a doctor’s complex that people can visit. That is what we want to do is showcase what the community is doing.”
Borderlon attributes growth to Villagers’ desire to stay informed, with the HOA’s focus changing from simply being a social opportunity.
“Over the past 10-15 years, the HOA became more focused on governance in giving a voice to the Villagers,” Borderlon said. “I think those people that joined want to stay on top of what’s going on in the Village. What we’re finding is that number of 1,800-plus is 40 percent of all our residents.
“Every year, our membership goes back to zero,” he added. “We’re going to be looking at ways to make that process easier to sign up each year. ... We’re going to try to go where people can sign up online. Basically, people are finding time to (get involved). Our membership grows month to month. Right now, we’re at 780 households. Last year, we were at 411. ... We’d like to say we’d be in 2,000 households by the end of this year.”
Another focus this year is increasing the number of social activities by 25 percent, with the most recent social gathering including sign-ups for 19 different events.
Sue English-Kovar coordinates events, including an aquarium tour in the Smoky Mountains, theater performances in Knoxville and Nashville, and different sports including bowling, golf and pickleball.
“That’s really a response to the requests of the people in the community,” McBrien said. “One of the things that we’ve noticed is it’s exciting people who have been out of this social activity to get more into it. We also want to offer opportunities for the older population by getting them rides and making sure the places we go are wheelchair accessible.”
Borderlon believes it’s important to offer social activities for people moving into Tellico Village who are looking to make new friends.
A new website rolling out in February will help to facilitate online sign-ups for upcoming events and membership.
“It will enable us to do a better job of communicating to folks and eventually allow them to sign up online,” McBrien said. “We were exploring what would happen if we could let people sign up online. We had over 100 people sign up for the fall cruise. There was over 40 people that signed up to the trip to the aquarium.”
