After two days of pressure washing, the courts were ready for pickle ball lines.

A huge thank you to Dustin Schmidt for taking time on his Friday evening to purchase supplies and to Sean Drew for helping Dustin complete the lines. They look great!

Both courts are now available for outdoor pickle ball. In the past month, we’ve seen many more families enjoying the courts. What a great investment in our community.

The pressure washing work will be complete on Monday, July 10, in the morning hours. The outer edges are not yet finished.

Information on the neighborhood pickle ball clinic will be shared at the annual meeting on July 17. See you there!

It’s time for our annual meeting! Mark your calendar (and set a reminder) for Monday, July 17th. We’ll start at 5:30 PM with food. The HOA is providing chicken and beef street tacos from Taqueria del Rey, bottled water, and paper goods. Homeowners are welcome to bring side dishes or desserts to share. Bring a chair to sit in!

The membership meeting begins at 6:30 PM. This is our one meeting for the year, and we’d love to see as many homeowners as possible in attendance. If you have an item to add to the agenda, please email it to officers@strawberryhillhoa.org.

Mary Mingels has served as treasurer since January 2022. She is willing to continue but would also be happy to pass this responsibility to a new officer. For more details about what is involved with being our treasurer, view this post.

Meeting agenda

• Previous meeting minutes approval
• Treasurer’s report
• Committee reports:
  • General Park updates
  • Playground committee
  • Pickleball committee
• Old business:
  • Water filtration update from KPUD
• New business:
  • House Bills 1337 and 1110
  • 2024 budget review and approval
  • Election of board members and officers
• Homeowner open forum
  • Movie night
• Door prize

Our tennis courts are receiving their biannual cleaning services on Thursday and Friday, July 6-7. The pressure washing and cleaning is being completed by Confia Paintings and Coatings. The courts will be closed during daytime hours these two days.

After pressure washing is complete, Dustin & Melanie Schmidt offered to paint the pickle ball lines back on the courts using a line kit. The HOA will reimburse the Schmidts for the supplies and is grateful for their volunteer time to make this happen!

Jim Cole and Nancy Fairweather have volunteered to run a neighborhood pickle ball clinic for interested homeowners. More information to follow.

Thank you Michelle Gaska for organizing our first 4th of July kids bike parade!

Join Michelle at the park at 2 PM if you’d like to decorate your bikes together. She will have some supplies.

All kids are welcome (bikes, strollers, scooters, wagons, and more) to decorate their own wheeled transportation and join in the parade starting at 3 PM at the park entrance. The parade will travel up Cabrini toward the water tower.

We invite all residents to walk outside and wave at the parade.

Pickleball is a game that was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, by three neighbors, Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum, to entertain their bored children. They used a badminton net, table tennis paddles, and a wiffle ball to create the game. In 2022, pickleball became the official state sport of Washington!

With the rise of pickle ball as a family pastime, Jim Cole suggested that we make our tennis courts more usable by more people by adjusting one net to pickle ball size.

A few weeks ago, Jim added stanchions and a height marker to show the proper width and height for a pickle ball net using the existing tennis nets. This cost the association nothing and allows pickle ball players to use a proper net.

Jim also pointed out that the pickle ball lines were not repainted when the courts were refinished years ago. The lines are very faint at this point. Jim volunteered to provide a quote for painting the lines again to the members for voting at the summer annual meeting.

If you’re interested in playing at the courts, head on over! What a great time of year to try a new activity.

Entrance clean up day is tomorrow, Saturday May 6th, and we’re starting at 10 AM. Thanks to Melanie Schmidt for organizing and providing donuts! Meet at the neighborhood entrance to volunteer.

Clean up areas:

• Clean the entrance sign and bricks but focus on trash all along the outer fenced area of the park on Bielmeier Rd, up to the stop sign on Phillips Rd
• Clean up trash along the path heading into the park
• Clean up trash on Phillips behind the barrier (a good job for adults, considering the traffic and proximity to the road)

We are providing large trash bags and buckets.

If you have small trash bags to bring, please do so…that might be easier to use as you walk and discard after it’s full.

Thanks for all your willingness to help and clean up the hood!

The map below contains our target clean up areas. Blue is the “high traffic” area that is best for adults (or teens with parent permission).

Melanie Schmidt has organized a community clean up event for our neighborhood on Saturday, May 6th. Please consider joining your neighbors as we walk and tidy our streets of litter, branches, and other rubbish. Gloves and trash bags provided.

Mark your calendar, and thanks Melanie for coordinating this!

Do you ever think, “One person’s vote doesn’t matter?” Tonight it did! We were just one house short of a quorum at our membership meeting! Fortunately, we didn’t have any major issues to vote on, and we will continue functioning with the existing budget although it hasn’t been officially approved by the membership.

Meeting minutes from today’s meeting are available here.

Linked documents inside our minutes include:

• A memo from the Architectural Control Committee to the membership
• Water filtration system update email
• 2023 budget

We have tentatively scheduled our summer membership meeting and bbq for July 17.

We have a general membership meeting on Monday, January 23rd at 7:00 PM at 7966 Cabrini (the Keene home).

The board of directors met this evening and prepared an agenda for the meeting. Last meeting, we voted to include a fourth board member and to check on the approval process with our legal counsel. That vote was held in compliance with our by-laws, and so Duel Brown is officially a fourth board member through July 2023 when we renew all positions. Duel was included in our board meeting this month.

1. Approval of minutes from October meeting
2. Treasurer’s report
   • End of 2022 report
3. Playground committee report
4. Unfinished business
   • Water filter installation updates
   • Landscaping maintenance and scotch broom removal
5. New business
   • 2023 budget (first half only) – updated since your dues mailing so check this link for the most recent version
   • Community litter walk
6. Community news
   • Reminders from the Architectural Control Committee
   • Summer annual meeting date

Budget notes:

• When we updated our by-laws, we changed our fiscal year to match our summer annual meeting. This summer, we will vote on a new annual budget. Since our budget from last year only went through the calendar year, our treasurer has prepared a budget for 2023 now. We’ll vote on this budget now, and then on a new fiscal year budget in July. Thank you, Mary, for doing double the work this year as we adjust. Dues payments will not change and are still paid in January each year.
• The 2023 proposed budget includes two maintenance items that are not annual payments. This puts our budget over our expected income by $250. Last year’s expenses were under our budget by almost $2000, and we have a large reserve account, so the board feels comfortable with this amount. The two maintenance items are pressure washing the tennis courts (currently every three years) and removing the scotch broom from the park (one time project).

Based on feedback from homeowners at the last meeting, the officers undertook ordering and installing new signage at the neighborhood park. We used a local small business, Ace Signs in Bremerton, and Jim Cole volunteered to install the new signs. They are aluminum and should last a very long time looking great!

We also installed one additional welcome sign at the “back entrance” to the park – the path that ends above the tennis courts. This means that both entrances have posted welcome signs letting visitors know they are on private property. A big thank you to Sawyer Drew and Jim Cole for installing the new post in concrete for us!

The “back entrance” to the park has a chain between two posts that is used to keep vehicles from entering the park. The lock has not been used in years, is rusted, and had a key. We replaced the lock with a new combination lock (same combo as all other HOA locks, see Facebook page for that information or email the officers). Anyone can still walk or ride a bicycle around the posts.

Finally, thank you to Kristin Drew for posting “No trespassing” signs on the park fence to face SE Bielmeier Road. It should now be abundantly clear to any visitors that this is not a public park. If you happen to see visitors in the park who are not following our posted guidelines or acting suspiciously, you can be an assertive neighbor and either 1) inquire whether they are guests of a homeowner, if you feel safe to do so, in which case the homeowner should be present, or 2) report trespassers to law enforcement. Remember, our park is owned by you and is private property. You can treat it as you would treat your own backyard!