Thousands of citizens across the greater Houston area are celebrating National Night Out with their neighbors and law enforcement authorities on Tuesday, August 7th. It's our chance to take a bite out of crime by getting to know your neighbors and keeping an eye out for suspicious activity around the neighborhood. This will be the 24th year for National Night Out and it gets bigger every year.

You can coordinate a NNO event at a central location in your community with simple refreshments like hotdogs or pizza. Or you can have a grand party with moonwalks, games, food booths and guest speakers. Or you can encourage neighbors to put on their own block parties. Local law enforcement agencies can be very helpful in coordinating NNO events. Police officers and elected officials enjoy visiting NNO events throughout the community so let them know where you will be and they will come.

For more information and ideas, visit the National Night Out website at http://www.nationaltownwatch.org/nno/.

If you take photos of your NNO event and would like them posted on your community pages of our web site, please email them to eNewsMonthly@ciaservices.com. Here are a few photos of fun from community parties a few years ago.

We are very pleased to announce our 2007/2008 schedule of seminars that we will be presenting throughout the year for all of the Board members and volunteers in our communities. This will be the fifth year of our seminar series. We have trained nearly 500 students so far and have received very positive feedback on the content and presentation. Our goal is to provide timely and convenient educational opportunities to help you with your duties. Click here to view the seminar descriptions and schedule.

Each seminar begins at 6:30 p.m. and runs 2-1/2 hours. Since we always provide deli sandwiches, you won’t have to rush to eat dinner beforehand. You’ll leave with knowledge you can use immediately and a great notebook with the seminar slides, samples and reference materials. Here are the upcoming seminars:

This is the required training course for certification as a Community Website Administrator (CWSA) on the C.I.A Services web site. As a CWSA you'll be able to maintain the pages for your community. You'll be able to create news flashes, update key personnel, add community information, display photos, conduct surveys and much more. At the end of the seminar we'll give you a taste of HTML - the web language that will allow you to do some pretty advanced things if you like. Being a website administrator is very easy and you can do it from anywhere you have an internet connection.

• July 12, 2007 (Thursday), 6:30 p.m. — Southwest Office

"Super-Budgeting" is our term for preparing a comprehensive long term budget and business plan. This isn't something you do on the back of an envelope an hour before the budget meeting. We'll break the process down into understandable components and show you how assets and reserves fit in the picture. We'll start with a simple question that very few people can answer correctly: "How much money should our Association have in the bank?" By the end of the seminar, you'll know the correct answer for your Association. This is a critical seminar to take before you start looking at budgets.

• August 9, 2007 (Thursday), 6:30 p.m. — Southwest Office
• August 14, 2007 (Tuesday), 6:30 p.m. — North Office

You can register at any time by calling our Southwest Office at 713-981-9000 or emailing us at seminars@ciaservices.com.

Many of the municipal and community 4th of July festivities were rained out this year. But several of our communities had the parade scheduled between showers and some just made it an umbrella parade. It's hard to ignore a 4 year old that is very proud of her decorated wagon! The police and fire departments were great sports as usual.

We've all heard that replacing traditional incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) makes good sense but how many of use have done it? Maybe you thought fluorescents are expensive, ugly, hard to find and don't give off a nice light. Well, everything has changed and CFLs are the way of the future. Some municipalities and states have actually passed laws that will eliminate traditional bulbs from the store shelves in the not too distant future.

CFLs are now widely available and prices continues to drop. CFLs come in a variety of sizes and shapes to replace almost any traditional bulb. For locations where the bulb is exposed (such as vanity lights or floodlights), there are CFLs with glass covers that looks identical to traditional bulbs. You can purchase CFLs with a wide variety of color "temperatures" (warm, cool) to provide the look you want and you can even get CFLs that work with dimmers.

So why should you start switching to CFLs? CPLs last 8 times longer than traditional bulbs with ratings of 10,000 hours. If you have a light on timer that operates 6 hours a day, a traditional bulb will last about 8 months whereas a CFL will last 4-1/2 years! In addition, a CFL is very efficient using 80% less energy to produce the same light. A light from a traditional 60 watt bulb can be produced with a 12 watt CFL. Which lights should you change first in your home? Any that are hard to reach - put something in there that won't need changing for a very long time. Any that are high wattage or are used frequently - 80% cost savings can add up fast.

How big an impact can these lightbulbs have? If every one of 110 million American households bought just one compact fluorescent lightbulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.

There a nice article on this topic in the September 2006 issue of Fast Company magazine called How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World?. Read the article and make every new lightbulb purchase a fluorescent one.

Energy costs are rising and in a few years we'll be telling our children "I remember when gas was $1.89 a gallon". Many of us started driving when the price was under $0.50 a gallon but that really dates us. The reality today is that energy is getting more expensive and we all need to find ways to reduce consumption and save money.

C.I.A. Services created the Electricity Savings Program (ESP) in conjunction with Tara Energy in order to provide a program to our communities and all residents that will save money without hidden surprises. ESP is saving money for our clients. Those that signed on when we introduced our program last October have locked in rates for up to four years. Commercial accounts (i.e. the community common areas) have rates as low as 6.95 cents per kwh. Currently, residential accounts can lock in for 3 years at 9.75 cents per kwh. All new accounts receive a $25 credit on their first bill.

For more information on ESP including current rates and options, click here. So what are you waiting for? Think ESP and save!

We are proud of every one of our communities so it is always hard to find just one to highlight. We start by having each of our Community Managers write a nomination for one of their communities. We then read them all take a vote. Here are our most recent selections:

• July — Townewest Community Improvement Association
  Southwest Office — Olga Martinez, Community Manager
• June — Ashford Lakes Community Improvement Association
  Southwest Office — Allyson Abbott, Community Manager
• May — Clear Lake City Boulevard Association
  Southwest Office — Ralph Troiano, Community Manager

To see the full story on these communities and to see the past winners, visit the Community of the Month page on our web site.

Every month we appreciate the communities that are celebrating their anniversaries with us. Here are our clients that started with us in July.

• East Point Community Association — 17 years
• Colony Creek Village Community Association — 12 years
• Inwood Northwest Neighborhood Association — 6 years
• Royal Palms Homeowners Association — 3 years
• Ashford Lakes Community Improvement Association — 2 years

Our goal has always been to create a positive, long term relationship with all of our client communities. We are very proud to be managing all of these communities.