Alexandrea Duarte and Shawn Richardson face nearly $750 in homeowners association fines over vegetable beds in their Acworth front yard. The couple says the garden helps feed their children, including children with special dietary needs; the HOA has objected to the garden’s appearance.
The penalties began at $25 a day on September 28, according to Atlanta News First, and were nearing $750 by the week before Halloween. The couple says they use the front yard because their backyard does not get enough sunlight to grow food. Duarte told the station that the vegetables help meet the needs of some of their children with special dietary needs.
How the Dispute and Penalties Developed
The HOA first asked the couple in June to remove the garden from the front lawn. The June request preceded daily fines that began at the end of September, Atlanta News First reported. Some troughs had been in place for nearly two years. Duarte said she added cucumber trellises during the year and removed them after summer, describing changes to the garden as seasonal.
In an October 2 email, Community Management Associates told Duarte that all the galvanized steel garden beds had to be removed and that fines would continue until they were gone, the station reported. Duarte proposed removing newer beds while painting or enclosing older ones with brick or rock. She also offered to paint the trellises a color selected by the board, but the management company did not accept those proposals.
The HOA’s Rules Leave the Decision to the Board
The association’s governing documents do not specifically address gardens, according to Atlanta News First. Instead, they allow the board to determine whether something is unkempt or unsightly, and define a nuisance violation by reference to what the board considers obnoxious or unsightly. A Community Management Associates manager described the garden as not aesthetically pleasing but did not identify a specific feature as the problem. The HOA president told the station that the board had received four complaints from separate people and said it could not make an exception because it considered no other neighborhood lawn similarly unsightly or unkempt…