Foxridge Civic Association

January 2026

President’s comments:

Our 2025 year, my second year as president started out strong and was going really well. We found a new host for our website that was more user friendly and Sean Birchard our treasurer built a very nice informative website using Foxridge funds. The board established a new position of Community/social liaison and Francesca Birchhard established a new Facebook page and coordinated with St Giles to co-host an Easter egg hunt and fall festival. Island maintenance was going well and the neighborhood was looking better than it had in years. Unfortunately in late August, the you know what hit the fan. In other words, the truck hit the sign.

What a disaster, those of you who live in the front of Foxridge had to drive by the destruction daily. I want to thank Roger Nash for getting the driver’s information and sending me pictures. I went the day after the accident to get a police report. It took almost 3 weeks to get it, I also attempted to contact the driver and his insurance but the driver only gave a PO Box for contact information. I googled him and found several numbers and addresses. After several attempts and numerous hours of leg work I was able to speak with the owner of the vehicle who was not the driver. I contacted several companies to get estimates to fix the sign and finally got two quotes of $57,000 and $35,000. I filed a claim with the owner’s insurance but after two weeks they contacted me and told me the policy had been canceled prior to the accident. I again contacted the owner who gave me a new insurance policy and I filed a claim with them. After two weeks of calling the assigned adjuster daily with no return phone call or email, I decided to contact a friend of mine who is an attorney. He said he would call the insurance company to see if the adjuster would speak with him. After three to four days the adjuster called him and said they would have to investigate but they thought that the driver was not insured. Tommy Jr. a 26 year old was driving his father’s truck but only Tommy Sr. 56 years old was insured and his policy only allowed $10,000 for property damage. The attorney sent demand letters to the owner and driver for damages but they have not responded to him. The owner also would not cooperate with his insurance company and they have denied the claim. My attorney friend did not charge us a dime for his services. Long story short our only option is to sue the owner, driver and their insurance company but that would require we pay approximately $5000 upfront with the possibility of winning but never actually receiving any money. We can discuss this at the General Meeting on January 24th.

Given the above circumstances, the board by a 3 to 1 vote, decided that since it looked likely that we may not recover damages and even if we did it would take significant time, that we would use $4200 dollars to cleanup and rebuild the brick. We just couldn’t leave the mess on the ground any longer. Additionally it was agreed that we would spend an additional $300 dollars for letters, covering and landscape. That is about all we had to work with, leaving only approximately $2,000 in the association’s bank account.

The board immediately fractured. The Birchard’s were upset that I did not contact Morgan and Morgan, did not keep them informed enough (even though I informed the board of every significant event}. This took a long time and there were days, even weeks when there was nothing to update.

The day after the board meeting Mrs. Birchard showed up at my house with drawings of signs she wanted us to build to replace the old sign, not repair it. She had no cost estimate for the signs she wanted to build and I tried to explain to her that I had explored rebuilding the sign and it was cost prohibitive. A week later I went to the Birchard’s to pick up a check to pay the brick mason who had repaired the old sign. While there they started to berate my actions, said my lawyer friend was not competent, the sign was ugly, I should not have spent money maintaining the islands and could not understand why we were not getting insurance payment. They inferred that it was because I mishandled the situation. All of my actions throughout this process were with knowledge and approval of the majority of the board.

Mr Birchard sent me an email demanding that I spend no more money to complete the sign. At this point only the brick was repaired. I immediately called for another board meeting to confirm the previous board decision to repair the sign.

After the board confirmed the decision by a 2 to 1 vote, the Birchard’s resigned. They immediately and vindictively destroyed the community website and refused to turnover community property in their possession.

I will publicly thank Sean Birchard for the good work he did as our treasurer. I find it unfortunate that we disagreed on the way the board decided to spend our limited capital. I also standby the decisions that the board made and assure you every action I took as your president were in the best interest of our community.