Repairing the road in 2006

When the good weather arrived in 2006, we crawled out from hibernation and set about forming a home owners' association. The whole process was pretty easy as there were already covenants governing the subdivision and we adopted those as the rules of our HOA. To placate those with fears of everyone being fined for letting their grass grow or painting their front door the wrong color, we removed those restrictions and did away with the architectural design committee. All we wanted to do was to fix the road.
A road committee was formed and we called for quotes from 4 roading contractors. We knew what we wanted - rip the entrance road up, resurface the rest and put in some drains. Explaining that to the contractors was a thankless task and we needed to talk to almost all of them several times to get them to quote for what we'd asked for. At the end of the process, we had three quotes (one company being a complete dead loss - it wasn't their line of work, though it didn't stop them quoting) - all of which were within a couple of thousand bucks of each other. Courtesy of the rise in the price of oil (and hence asphalt), the cost per lot was now around $2,200, up by $600 from last year although we'd added some drain work to the spec. And so, in August 2006, we called Moore & Son Site Contractors Inc to get a final quote and a start date. We then let everyone in the subdivision know that work was expected to start in about 6 weeks and that they should make arrangements to park cars elsewhere for the 4 days it was expected to take.
Time to sit back and wait and then watch the action. Or so we thought.

START HERE - Repairing a private road

Coachmans Trail is a small subdivision near the beautiful city of Asheville, North Carolina. Like many such subdivisions, it is very neighborly, pretty hilly and served by a private road. That doesn't mean we've got gates or "Go Away" signs on it - it just means that the people who live here are responsible for fixing it. The road was laid about 20 years ago and while most of it is in good shape, the main entrance road leading into the subdivision had reached the stage of being 100 yards of potholes. So we had to do something about it.
A "town meeting" was called in 2005 where almost everybody agreed that we should all chip in some cash to get the road fixed properly. A committee was formed to get quotes from sundry roading companies covering a number of options ranging from bodging to ripping the whole lot up and starting again. A contractor was selected and everyone was asked to contribute about $1600 per lot. At this point, a couple of people refused to pay so it became obvious that we needed to form a home owners' association to force the objectors to pay.
Needless to say, talk of HOA nazis started going around, especially from a couple of people who had moved here largely because there was no HOA. So the whole thing wound up on the shelf for 2005 and the road continued to get worse (like I care - I drive a Forester).