Whatever happens, someone will be unhappy.
The Village of Oakcreek Association is scheduled to hold a second appeals hearing Wednesday, Jan. 6, at 9 a.m. for an application for a Hilton Garden Inn on a vacant parcel along State Route 179 in the Village of Oak Creek. At the hearing, the HOA’s board of directors could approve or deny the hotel’s first proposed design.
For a volunteer board that spends most of its time amicably discussing and approving funds for golf course equipment, the issue of how stringently to apply the HOA’s architectural rules to the proposed hotel has turned into a messy affair, with a group of HOA members in the Pine Creek II subdivision threatening litigation in December.
Last month, VOCA President Gwen Hanna resigned from the board, citing health issues. The board made Vice President John Rogers the new president.
In 2019, the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors put the hotel project in motion by changing the parcel at SR 179 and Jacks Canyon Road from residential to commercial zoning, at the request of owners Jack and Chandrika Patel.
That cleared a major hurdle for the upscale hotel, but as part of the Pine Creek II subdivision within VOCA, the parcel owners are beholden to the HOA’s architectural restrictions — or many VOCA members believe.
VOCA’s board has appeared less certain of its power in recent months to regulate a commercial structure.
During the application’s first appeal hearing in October, the board of directors announced that, after consulting with its counsel, it determined the prohibition on two-story structures in the subdivision — one of the major objections in the architecture committee — did not apply to the rezoned parcel.
The board has not shared the legal reasoning behind that determination with its membership.
Rather than approving the plans at that time, the VOCA board sent the designs back down to the HOA’s architecture committee to vet the other components of the hotel plan, hoping the committee would defer to the board’s opinion on the height issue.
It did not.
Three architecture committee members questioned the propriety of the committee ignoring the HOA’s height rules and cited other design features besides height, such as a proposed roof-top deck and a parking lot facing SR 179, in voting against approval once again.
VOCA members and representatives for the Pine Creek II subdivision have called on the HOA’s board to uphold the subdivision’s architectural rules. In recent meetings, members have also criticized the board’s handling of the application, citing its move to replace the chairman of the architecture committee with a member of the board, and the board meeting frequently in closed sessions, in apparent violation of bylaws.
“This is really the most important reason for this board to exist,” said Barry Kerr, asking the board to uphold the architecture committee’s denial of the hotel application at the Dec. 23 meeting. “The golf course is great; you’re doing a great job — but this is the sort of thing that we think about when we decide whether we want to pay more money to the organization to represent us.”
Several other VOCA members urged upholding the denial at the meeting. Rogers said the board would not comment on these concerns before the Jan. 6 hearing.
“We’ve been advised by counsel, and we pay very close attention to counsel, that we should not make substantive responses regarding the issue. We’re supposed to hear both sides and vote. And its frustrating for you, it’s frustrating for us,” Rogers said.
