View Protection History
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Developers’ brochures promised, ”PANORAMIC VIEWS. Breathtaking beautiful, unrivaled and unobstructed” and “ARCHITECTURAL CONTROL. Assures optimum lasting enjoyment and protection of your panoramic view site in Somerset and maintains the value of your home.”
The covenants gave a lot of power to the Building Committees to keep their promises, including rejecting any proposal for any reason.
The original intent of the covenants included the following:
Use lot max heights to create smooth ridgelines (Art 4 required a residence max height to be determined before construction)
Protect the originally created views (Art 4 & 10)
Prevent vegetation from obstructing a homeowner’s view (Art 10)
After the community was built, the Building Committees stopped functioning and people had to fend for themselves. To help settle disputes, about 2/3 of the covenants adopted an amendment to give the CRC the powers the Building Committees had.
To aid consistency and public awareness of how the CRC would rule in view matters, a View Guideline was created in 2008 and modified slightly in 2016. “The Spirit of the Guideline” was “To preserve the views of a residence, the way they were, when the house was Built.”
Most thought this meant “things above the View Line were protected”, some thought “only things above the lowest element” i.e. were territorial views below a lake part of a lake view; were territorial views protected?
In 2022, a new resident applied for a second story addition.
Our long-standing attorney, who helped write the View Guidelines, drafted the denial letter which said the View Guideline defined a line that shouldn’t be crossed and that territorial views were protected.
The denied applicant became the CRC chair. Our attorney retired, and the Board approved the CRC chair’s recommended replacement.
In 2023, the CRC approved a second story addition saying the area between the View Line and the elements was not protected.
Then the CRC changed the View Guidelines. They:
Removed “To preserve the views of a residence, the way they were, when the house was Built”
Deleted the View Line and any reference to it
Said the View was only the identified elements (nothing below them)
Division 8 neighbors are now exploring simple and sensible view regulations to amend to our covenant to ensure we have the protections we thought we had and prevent any future CRC reversals. It looks like adding three sentences to Article 4 and one sentence to Article 10, and attaching our version of the View Guidelines will do.
