Town Crier Articles

 

With the recent launch of Chesapeake Bay’s new administrative portal, we have received some questions about which website application to use. 

 

 

The Chesapeake Bay Management (CBM) Portal is for NTRA owners only. It is the source of information on your accounts as well as any violations or architectural requests you may have in process. In other words, if you have a money question or received a violation letter, you may personally communicate with Chesapeake through the owner portal.

 

The documents available on the portal are for ease of the user and largely relate to violations, e.g. governing documents, architectural forms, paint colors – as well as letters/eblasts sent from CBM. 

 

 

The NTRA website remains the official communications channel for our community. It is open to owners in both the NTRA and the New Town Commercial Association and provides certain access for New Town tenants. It is also the public face of the New Town Residential Association so some website features are public pages.

 

All official NTRA documents are on the NTRA website – Governing Documents, Committee agendas and minutes, policies, forms, calendar, etc.  While we had hoped that perhaps some of this material would transition to the portal, CBM’s system does not offer the robustness or capabilities that the NTRA website already has. Issue reports/tickets should continue to be submitted through the website “Report an Issue” feature. (Note – CBM’s May 2022 letter was a corporate letter sent to all HOAs and did not apply to our particular situation because Chesapeake had never managed our website.)

 

So how do we keep the website current and meaningful to users?  WE NEED MORE VOLUNTEERS. Our team of three website volunteers is down to one. This administrative workload is not a CBM responsibility. Luckily, the website software is intuitive and uploading documents/updating news is straightforward for anyone who works with Microsoft Office. You do not need to be a “techie” or have any programming experience to do this.  Best yet, you can volunteer from your own home/laptop. If you could help us to manage the website even if only for a few hours a month, please email: ntrawebsitecommittee@gmail.com.

 

Finally, to help minimize user confusion, CBM has updated its owner portal home page to clearly show these functional differences between the sites.

 

 

As a general rule of thumb, start with the NTRA website unless you are paying a bill or trying to stay out of trouble by clarifying/responding to a violation notice!