The strip along Sugarhill Ave next to Winn-Dixie has a long history with Sugarhill. As far back as the early 1980’s our association decided the appearance of the Savannas Plaza (Winn-Dixie’s home) was unappealing enough to warrant the association to fund a landscaping effort. Seven lamp posts (like the ones we all have in front of our houses) were installed and electrified, a fence was built, a hedge was planted and an extension was added to the existing plaza’s irrigation and all obviously with the approval of the plaza’s then owner (no written agreements can be found). All of this has been maintained for all these years by Sugarhill at our expense.

Now, some forty years later a third owner of the plaza comes along undertaking a huge remodel of the building. He’s difficult-at-best to get hold of. Part of the remodel included a curbing that runs the length of our maintained area on the Winn-Dixie side of the fence. When the curb was installed the irrigation main lines were broken in numerous places making irrigation impossible.

A phone call to him offering to repair (at our expense) the broken irrigation seemed to ignite a fuse. He apparently does NOT want Sugarhill on his property and the strange conversation ended with him telling us we were trespassing and for us to leave.

So while this may seem like a disaster it’s really not. Three years ago the wiring on the lamp posts began showing hazardous aging. Hiring electricians in this day requires a permit for the certified electrician to be able to work. The lamps were on County easement and couldn’t have a permit for the electrician approved without a $2600 permit fee. We called our attorney to see if there were liability issues with the lamps and he said absolutely and he recommended that we remove them immediately. We called our Insurance company and asked if there was or could be insurance on the lamps, the answer was “no, they don’t insure things not on our property.” With all of this information we have now removed the lamps and other posts that Sugarhill put in.

Before we were abruptly shut down we were trying to grow the hedge to the height of the fence because the fence, while it is only four years old, is aging fast. With no irrigation, we can expect the entire area to begin to look fairly dead and messy.

An upside of this for Sugarhill is the huge amount of financial savings from not having to maintain anything along that strip. Hopefully the owner of that property will see the light and realize he needs to maintain the area. We can only hope.