What to Do If You Want to Make a Change or Addition to Your Home or Outdoor Landscaping

It is the position of your Peachtree Village Neighborhood Union that all homeowners should be able to do whatever they want with their home or property, as long as they don't present any reasonable risk to health or safety to any person, pet or someone else's property. But in reality, this otherwise self evident truth is not always recognized by a City Government and it is intentionally violated by HOAs. So, our Neighborhood Union advises every homeowner to check with the City of Plano before making any changes or additions to a home or landscaping. In general, if the change or addition is a minor one, the City will not require a permit. But for bigger changes or additions, you may have to get a permit before you begin construction, and a city inspector may come by to check on the quality of the installation, sometimes, more than once, mainly to make sure the change or addition meets basic standards of safety. Therefore, we advise everyone to check with the City first to find out if you need a permit to make the change or addition you want for your home, before you spend any money for materials or hire any contractor to do the work (though a professional contractor should already be familiar with the City's construction codes and apply on your behalf for any permits necessary).

Of course, some of the City's codes are outdated and intrusive, but the good news is that, because the City is a democratic institution and not some sort of oligarchy (like HOAs are), we, as citizens, have the right to go to our elected leaders, like the Mayor and the City Council, to tell them what changes we'd like them to make. The other really good thing about the City's rules is that, in the event the City says a person has done something wrong and they issue a fine accordingly, you can assert your rights to challenge the fine in a court of law where, if need be, you could also assert your right to be judged, not by the government, but by your peers! Consequently, because the City knows they can't just do whatever they please without any regard for your rights, they are usually more careful about what they say you can or cannot do with YOUR property. They also know we can vote out the Mayor or City Council members, so they are more inclined to listen to us when we approach them to make changes to outdated or intrusive City ordinances.

As far as Peachtree Village HOA is concerned, they are STILL trying to say everyone needs to get THEIR permission from the Architectural Control Committee (the ACC) BEFORE you even approach the City or if you have already secured a permit for your change or addition project, if required by them! Worse, they have 100s of very arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with safety, health or the quality of any given construction project or landscaping change. Basically, the HOA is just trying to appease a handful of persons who either 1) have some sort of psychological problem that compels them to control other people or 2) are bigots of some sort (cannot stand others from a different race, ethnic group, national origin, family type, culture, etc.), and they want to use SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT of HOA rules as a weapon to drive out the type of people they don't want to live among us, and sometimes, it's both 1) and 2)!

Very disappointingly, the new Board has come out, already, threatening the homeowners of Peachtree Village with fines and efforts to make homeowners undo whatever changes or additions they don't like or which were not approved by the ACC. The position of our Union, by contrast, is that the ACC should be suspended, mainly because so many homeowners (who were, apparently, members of the sort of group of people the HOA likes) have been able to make so many changes or additions to their homes, landscaping or other property, and the HOA didn't have any problem with them doing so, meaning, that to now tell anyone else they can't, for example, paint their front door a bright red color, when one or more other homeowners were able to do so, constitutes discrimination, which is, by the way, against the Law!!! We are prepared, therefore, that if any homeowner choses to make a change or wants to put an addition on their home or do something different with their landscaping or fencing, as long as they are following whatever the City of Plano says is necessary to meet the City's property codes, if the HOA threatens them in any way to impede them from doing anything that has, already, been either formally or tacitly approved by the HOA in the past for any other homeowner's property, for more than 30 days (which is the maximum amount of time for an ACC to voice any disapproval of any change or addition, according to our CCRs, we will assist them on how to file discrimination complaints against the HOA with the proper Law Enforcement authorities!

Of course, we cannot stop anyone from submitting a request to the ACC if that's what you really want to do, probably because you might not want to experience all the grief you might get from the HOA if you don't, regardless of whether or not you shouldn't have to. We get that. So, for this reason, the Founder of our Union has already volunteered to serve on the ACC (for however much longer it continues to exist), in order to provide some measure of protection for our homeowners against attempts to use this committee to discriminate or harass them.