Killearn Lakes is a 3,000-acre suburban community in northeast Tallahassee, full of mature trees, winding roads, and a scattering of lakes. The homeowners’ association there manages over 440 acres of green space, five lakes, and three community parks. Recently, it tried to roughly double everyone’s annual dues. It did not go smoothly.
The plan was to raise annual dues from $120 to $250 for regular homeowners, and $268 for lakefront owners. In letters to residents, the board explained the money would go toward enhanced code enforcement, lake and park maintenance, green space upkeep, and repairs to dams and spillways. Reasonable-sounding stuff, in theory.
In practice, it set off a revolt.
Not as reasonable as it sounds
The flashpoint wasn’t just the size of the increase. It was how the votes were being handled. HOA votes often rely on proxies, where homeowners who can’t attend a meeting assign their vote to someone who can. Resident Ted Phillips accused the board of mishandling those proxies, and he said so out loud at a meeting.
“I made an announcement and told everybody, ‘If you want to vote no with your proxy, do not give it to these people. They’re automatically counting every proxy they collect as a yes vote,’” Phillips told WTXL ABC 27 News. “That’s when the crowd got angry and loud.”
Phillips wasn’t shy about how he felt regarding the board overall. “I don’t trust anything they do or say,” he said. “The whole board needs to go, and we need to replace them with honest people and put some people in there that are going to be transparent and are going to be frugal with our money.”
The board’s side of the story isn’t unsympathetic. Mark Reichert, the former board president who’s lived in the area for 42 years, pointed out that the last dues increase was in 2005, two decades ago, while costs have climbed relentlessly since. “You can’t run an organization the size of a small city on a budget that has been flat for 21 years,” he said. “Since 2005, the consumer price increase has gone up 64%, so how have we managed over the years? We’ve cut services.”
Reichert also made the self-interested-but-honest argument that nobody wins if the neighborhood deteriorates, including him, because his own property value would drop alongside everyone else’s.
Is there a middle ground?
The data backs up the idea that rising HOA fees are common. A March 2026 LendingTree survey of 2,000 American residents found that 82% reported an increase in their HOA fees over the past three years. A separate Frontdoor survey found that about 35% of homeowners don’t think their HOA fees are reasonable, and 51% reported a fee increase.
So the board’s underlying problem may well be legitimate. But legitimacy doesn’t matter much if homeowners don’t trust how the decision gets made. And in this case, they didn’t.
Fighting back
On May 14, the board voted to postpone the increase. Its official notice said the adjustment is “deferred until further notice” while a “revised implementation timeline” is finalized. The controversy also cost the board its president, who resigned over the dispute.
Interim President Richard P. Massa Jr. struck a conciliatory tone, acknowledging the board needs to own its mistake and find a better way to communicate with homeowners. He said he hopes to rebuild trust through transparency and open dialogue.
The next meeting on the issue is scheduled for June. Whether the board can make its case without another room full of angry residents remains to be seen. The math may be on their side but the goodwill, at the moment, is not.
