The Kingsview Homeowners Association Board of Directors thought their developers would naturally want to stay on good terms with the residents since builders were still raising houses in the neighborhood; but, that doesn’t appear to have been the case.

HOA Board President Tonja Brooks quickly discovered that her builders didn’t seem to want anything to do with the people who’d purchased homes from them once the homeowner had taken possession of the house.

“It’s been difficult getting responses from the developers,” Ms Brooks told The Bay Net this week in a phone interview.

K & P Homes at Kingsview, Charles County.
Photos by A. Dailey for TheBayNet.com.

She eventually had to form a petition with representative signatures from each of the forty-eight houses around hers, before the builders would take Kingsview residents seriously.  Only after the petition did K Hovnanian Homes actually fix the items they were responsible for fixing in the homes they’d sold.

What Ms Brooks dealt with personally now faces the community and its board of directors.  K & P Homes, K Hovnanian Homes (formerly Washington Homes) and Miller & Smith Builders have all been dragging their feet about fixing items under their responsibility in the public areas around the neighborhood.

The Kingsview neighborhood off Billingsly Road between Waldorf and Bryans Road is in a state of transition. The builders are nearly finished with the development. Upon completion, they’ll turn over the public areas to Charles County; who will, in turn, give many of them to the care and keeping of the Kingsview HOA and its board of directors.

HOA dues will take care of public areas and the county will take responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure.

The HOA, however, has discovered several problem spots which they’d rather not inherit and which shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The items were detailed this month in an update to the County Commissioners and in The Bay Net’s interview with Ms. Brooks.

K & P Homes and Miller & Smith Builders didn’t open storm drains after they were installed.   Every time it rains, four streets and a townhouse parking area flood. The builders have moved on to other streets, and told the Kingsview Board they intended to open all the drains when they finished construction in that section as a whole. The Board thinks it makes more sense and is safer to have the drains open now.

K & P also didn’t think it their responsibility to remove snow and ice from its streets which were partially sold and partially under construction last winter. They insisted that they had turned those streets over to the County. The Board checked with the County and confirmed that K & P was still responsible.

Trucks associated with K & P’s current construction have taken chunks out of landscaping borders near the community’s entrance. Again, the developer told the Board they’d fix the damage when construction was finished,