What Can (and Can't) an Architectural Control Committee Do?

The ACC made some pretty serious procedural mistakes in the 2007 denial of a remodel plan for the house at lot 34. This resulted in a re-hearing and reversal by a newly re-formed ACC, under the supervision of Association attorney Rick Shattuck. Rick provided us with a Washington State Bar Association publication describing, among other things, the procedural standards that an ACC needs to follow:

1. Did it exclude biased persons from the ACC?

2. Did its members fully inform themselves' including

visiting the site?

3. Did it afford interested parties a full and fair

opportunity to present information for the ACC to

consider?

4. Did it gather all the relevant information it needed to

have in order to make a fully informed decision?

5. Did it take steps to veriff that the information it

intended to rely upon was accurate?

6. Did it seek information from an "expert"?

7. Did it actually consider the information it collected?

8. Did it correctly apply the standards to the facts?

9. Does its decision advance the common plan?

10. Is the decision consistent with ACC decisions on

similar applications?

11. If the decision is different than decisions on past

similar applications, has the ACC articulated valid

and reasonable justifications for distinguishing the

present application from the previous ones?

12. Is its decision in writing?

13. Does it set forth its findings and conclusions

supporting its decision-that is, does it explain how it

got from the evidence to the decision?

14. If the decision denies approval of a proposal, does it

describe why the proposal was rejected or what

alternative actions might be approved?

The new ACC ( not the same ACC that made the original decision ) members at the time this document was recieved by counsel included Karl Scherer, Nathan Kellogg, Roger Noll, and Ray Donahue.