Putting green makes neighbors red hot

Article Courtesy of The Sun Herald

By RACHEL ALEXANDER
Published April 17, 2006

ENGLEWOOD -- A putting green on the front lawn of a Rotonda home had several community residents verbally clubbing each other at a recent Rotonda West Association Board of Directors meeting.

John Sciandra announced his disapproval of his neighbor's Astro Turf putting green that takes up a good portion of the man's front yard.

"They weakened everything here by allowing that," Sciandra said. "It's the only one of it's kind. One is behind a house, you can't even see it. It's not grass. It's Astro Turf. What if everybody in Rotonda decided to put a putting green in their front yard? It would be a big mess."

But Don Lutz, president of the RWA board, disagrees.

"This is a golfing community," Lutz said, "so it makes perfect sense to me to have a putting green in a golfing community. To me, it's like having a pool in your yard. To me it's not that big a deal."

A Rotonda homeowner recently installed a putting green in front of his home.

Both Sciandra and Lutz agreed the residential modification committee for the RWA rejected an application for the putting green because the owner did not get a permit for the site and because it did not have "vegetation-site screening," a term used by the committee for a buffer to block the putting green from view.

Then the committee started fining the owner of the property.

"The board never ratified that fine," Lutz said.

He said because there is no mention of vegetative-site screening or no mention of putting greens in the by-laws or deed restrictions, the board was not at liberty to approve the committee's decision.

"I'm not making a decision on 'Oh, I might get sued.' We need to follow our rules. The board has to make a decision whether they were going to defend the committee. And so that's the issue that brought this particular issue to the top of the pile," Lutz said. "In researching, we don't have any written guidelines or deed restrictions that requires vegetative-site screening.

"The board made this rule up," Lutz said. "We were getting to the place of a lawsuit. The majority of the board disagreed with adopting that application."

Nick Gizzi, however, who is a member of both the RWA board and the residential modification committee, said the committee had approved some of these same owner's putting greens when he added shrubbery to his site plans.

"When this fellow did his first house, he followed the rules, showed the green with all kinds of shrubbery and it was approved," Gizzi said. "He got involved with these other greens and people complained."

Gizzi said the major complaint was that he refused to screen the putting green.

When this particular request went before the committee, the plan did not include shrubs and the committee denied the green.

When the matter went before the board of directors, it voted 4 to 3 to reverse the committee's recommendations and allow the putting green.

Gizzi said, "Section 5, Planned Specification and Architectural Review basically states the association can refuse approval of a plan based on any grounds, including purely aesthetic grounds."

He said decisions are at the discretion of the committee.

"The committee acted properly and the board reversed what they tried to do," Gizzi said.

Gizzi said two members of the modification committee refused to sign off on the approval to allow the putting green, so Tom Noonan and Lutz as an ex-officio member of the committee and as president of the board, signed the approval for the putting green.

Gizzi said he wasn't particularly concerned about the structure as he was the way it was approved.

"My concern is that the board voted 4 to 3 to reverse the decision of the RMC," Gizzi said.

He said in the interest of time, any two members can review a request and sign approvals for any routine things, like painting.

"That's been working," he said.

But he said this case was different, since the committee recommended the board not approve the putting green.

"It just doesn't sit right," Gizzi said. "The procedures that are being followed here, I'm very concerned. My concern was the way it was handled from the beginning."

Pete Traverso stood up at Wednesday's RWA meeting supporting Gizzi's position.

"It doesn't pass the sniff test," Traverso said.