Weekly Update - February 28
Gate Access Changes
As many neighbors have recently realized, one of the two fob receivers at the Venice Ave gate has stopped working. If you recall several months ago the Board voted to no longer support the fob access technology. We are holding to that, and will not be repairing the fob access technology when it stops working. However, what we are doing is replacing it with better technology. In the next week or two a “License Plate Reader” (LPR) gate access camera will be installed and operational on the Venice Ave entry gate. Once it is active you will no longer need to use a fob or your cell phones to open the gate. You’ll just slowly pull up near the keypad and the LPR camera will scan your rear license plate and open the gate. We’re holding off adding this to the River Rd entry gate for now because that number of accesses currently is less than half as much as the Venice Ave gate, and the suspicion is that will drop even more once the River Rd construction is completed because it seems that the access to the River Rd entry will be from the South-bound lane of traffic only. We’ll keep an eye on this and determine later if the future usage volume at the River Rd entry gate warrants adding the LPR system there or not.
Instructions on adding your license plates into your Tap-2-Open account will be coming soon.
In the meantime, the Tap-2-Open mobile app continues to function as normal, so use that if you’ve lost fob access until the LPR system is up and running
Irrigation
The (new) irrigation pump station system has been working exceptionally well. The system is “state-of-the-art”. It has a rain gauge that triggers the system to turn off for 24 hours if ½ of inch of rain is measured. In a normal summer that trigger will trip the system off every day or two, so that will save CV a lot of money in electric costs, and save wear and tear on the pump system. It also has a cell service based monitoring system that we access from our computers or phones to monitor it. We can tell when the pumps turn on and for how long, as well as the intervals between on and off. This monitoring has made us aware that there are leaks in the pipes out in the community. When the system was installed, the pumps would cycle on every 15 minutes just to restore the water pressure, not because it was calling for watering. This told us we had leaks. Justin has found and repaired several leaks, thus dropping that on/off cycling from every 15 minutes to every 45 minutes. It would be awesome if we could find more leaks and get that cycling down to just a few times a day, but finding leaks is very very difficult because it’s just a lucking sighting of a consistent wet spot when we find one. If any of you notice a constant wet spot or standing water in a lawn or common area, please report it.
FYI - Our system timer is setup to water all lawns 2 times each week between the hours of 4:00 PM and 10:00 AM. As of February 2026, Sarasota County is under one-day-per-week lawn watering restrictions due to extreme drought conditions. Changing the timing of our incredibly sophisticated and complex controller is not easy at all. Justin is not even sure how make the required changes to over 200 watering zones in the controller, and a while ago I had a company quote us to make changes to the timers and their price was over $4000. We have not yet been able to comply with this restriction because of the complexity, and because the County is not offering financial subsidies for large elaborate irrigation systems. Luckily, the county is not monitoring or enforcing compliance of this restriction, yet.
If you know an effective rain dance, please do it daily.
Fountains and Drought
As you’ve noticed, the fountain in the pond adjacent from the Venice Ave entry has been turned off for many weeks now. That particular pond is shallower than the other ponds with fountains. According to our survey maps, the deepest pond below a fountain is “Parrot Bay”, the one between Goombay and Parrotfish streets. That pond is 22 feet deep below the fountain when the pond is at normal water level (NWL), so we don’t worry about that fountain. The three new fountains (A, B, and C) in the large lake each have different depths below them. According to the survey maps we have, fountain A (closest to clubhouse) is 16 feet deep at NWL, B is 10 feet at NWL, and C is just over 5.5 feet at NWL. Because there are varying opinions floating around (pun intended) on those actual depths, we have asked our fountain maintenance company to come here this next week and do an official existing depth measurement at each fountain so that we will know for certain and catalog that for all future reference. Along with this, we are getting a quote to have a WIFI app installed on the large lake fountain controls so that we can turn individual fountains off / on from our phones or laptops, and also adjust the hours of operation when needed for daylight savings time adjustments.
Caribbean Village “Deep Dive” Podcasts
These dynamic podcasts are great ways to explain things about CV in a more efficient and effective way. Some folks have asked how much money the Board spending on having these created. Well, it is free. It is done by AI. The HOA uses Google Workspace as our email, live-streaming, and file system, and the AI system that creates these podcasts is bundled within that Google Workspace subscription at no additional costs. We will continue to provide these fun and informative podcasts as needed.
HOA Board Meetings
This will be the topic of the next Deep Dive podcast because it is confusing about the different types of Board meetings and the requirements around “duly noticed meetings” for each type. Some folks have raised questions, which tells us that most folks probably have the very same questions around this. Keep an eye out for the next Deep Dive coming this next week on this topic.
That’s all for this week - Have a great weekend!!