Dear Neighbors from Avila Village Owners

From Avila Village Ownership:

Dear Neighbors:

We believe recent circumstances warrant communication with our neighbors regarding our ongoing litigation involving your HOA Board. Specifically, we want to address the litigation over parking rights along Lupine Canyon Road beside Avila Village.  

For decades, parking has been allowed along this portion of Lupine Canyon Road for both Avila Village owners, tenants and employees as well as SLBE residents so long as they were active customers with an Avila Village business. 

In 2018, the HOA Board instructed the gate guards to no longer allow us to use this parking for owners, tenants and employees.  This prompted years of expensive and unnecessary litigation.  The result—full vindication of our rights to utilize this parking for tenants, employees, and owners within the Village.

The HOA’s easement granted over this segment of Lupine Canyon Road is for ingress and egress only, not parking.  However, we have always agreed that HOA members may park along Lupine Canyon Road so long as such parking is used only to frequent one or more of the Avila Village businesses.  Now that our rights have been fully restored, we want to encourage you to continue to use this to access the Avila Village businesses.

Relatedly, you may have noticed that the Avila Village pedestrian gates are again unlocked and operational.  The HOA Board took it upon itself years ago to unlawfully weld and chain these gates shut.  It took six years and a final court judgment to restore this access. 

We now understand the HOA Board is proposing a new rule prohibiting SLBE resident customers of Avila Village businesses from using the Master Common Area in the gated community.   If effective, this rule would deny you the right to use this Lupine Canyon Road parking when frequenting Avila Village businesses. 

The “purpose” of this rule is ostensibly to comply with Section 2.4 of the CC&Rs which provides, in relevant part, that your rules “shall prohibit the use of the Master Common Area by customers of businesses located at commercial Lots and Condominiums of the Project.”  As the HOA Board well knows, and as it conceded repeatedly during our litigation, the term “Lots and Condominiums of the Project” is limited to parcels that have in fact been annexed into the HOA.  None of the businesses at the golf course or at Avila Village are annexed. Section 2.4 has no application here.  

Despite what you may have heard, while we may have the right to do so, we have never attempted to have non-SLBE residents park along Lupine Canyon Road while visiting Avila Village and it is not our intent to do so now. We intend to continue to limit customer parking along Lupine Canyon Road to SLBE residents along with Village tenants, employees, and owners.

We sincerely regret that it has come to this.  We tried several times to resolve this matter on terms much more favorable to the HOA than what was ultimately awarded by the Court.  And, you should know that not only were we successful in fully recovering our rights of access and use but we were awarded and have received from the HOA payment for our damages and attorneys’ fees totaling $360,000.   

Click here to read the final ruling from the Court on this matter.