Belmont Neighborhood Association struggling for recognition

by Avi Adelman of of Barking Dogs

Letter to the DHL (PDF)

LOWER GREENVILLE — Belmont Neighborhood Association has been waiting for nearly three months for the Dallas Homeowners League to call the required hearing (per their by-laws) on our application for membership.

The hearing - before the DHL board - will be between BNA and Lower Greenville NA due to overlapping boundaries (BNA claims the southern portion of the LGNA due to lack of attention to our issues).

The DHL is the only group that can call this hearing and force the LGNA to give up the area claimed by BNA.

While BNA is recognized informally at City Hall, this will be useless when hot neighborhood issues such as rezoning and code enforcement come up

BNA might be able to stand up and make a request to the council or plan commission, but then LGNA's reps would just come up behind us and say - Hey, did someone fart?? BNA is not a real association and we don't care what they say.

BNA has an IRS Non-Profit status 501c4, as well as State of Texas Non-Profit corporate status. Thanks to the sale of the Arcadia marquee, we have nearly $10,000 in the bank - these funds are dedicated to the protection of our area with resident only parking and aggressive crimewatch and community service.

For nearly ten years, LGNA has failed to deal with our quality of life issues - noise, parking, too many bars and not enough retail. Instead, they destroy any hope of future redevelopment on Lower Greenville and ignore our requests for help.

BarkingDogs.org covers the Lower Greenville Avenue area.

This story was submitted by a member of the Pegasus News community.

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Anonymous

tdog10, says:

I don't get it. If I understand things correctly, the Dallas City Council has delegated the authority to recognize homeowner leagues to the Dallas Homeowners League.

Yet, by the sounds of this letter and things I have read elsewhere... it's morphed into basically a back-scratching organization of insiders who don't even make any pretense of following their own rules when it doesn't particularly suit their hidden agenda.

How can an organization implementing public policy on behalf of the Dallas City Council be run in such an unprofessional manner?

Anonymous

2 years, 6 months ago
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Avi Adelman, says:

To my knowledge, which I don't vouch for being the best after lunch, there is no delegation of authority by the City to the DHL.

In fact, there are thirty plus associations north of LBJ that broke off from DHL (seven years ago??) and formed the North Dallas Homeowners Association (don't hold me to the name).

The DHL is the 500# gorilla at City Hall because it's there and not much else. There are kinks in the armor - some departments are NOT deferring to the DHL (or their council proxies) for participation on committees or discussions of issues like zoning.

And there are whole large sections of Dallas (like south of I20) that do not have any representation at the DHL.

To call the DHL an all-encompassing association for the city is a misnomer.

Avi