Clearing out reserve funds for monument sign replacements? [SFH] [MO]

I purchased my first home about 3 years ago in a 62 SFH Subdivision that is about 50 years old and I now find myself on the 3 person board.

The neighborhood dues are very low about $350/home but there also isn’t a ton of regular maintenance. Its is electrical for the street lamps, mowing and some landscaping at the entrances, insurance etc. We do have a lot of common ground but it is mostly wooded and doesn’t require a whole lot.

As I mentioned earlier the dues are very low. In the original document the dues were supposed to go up every 5 years to match inflation from $250 in 1976. That’s like over $1400 per year per home in today’s money. Obviously that never happened and it only went up to $350 from $250 4 years ago. So we only have about $20k in the reserves.

The neighborhood dynamic is interesting because it is going through a turnover. Most of the homeowners are older but the when a homeowner either passes or retires off to Florida the new homeowners are very young. I am young, at least comparatively, early 30s. The other two trustees are older and have already basically told me that they are only staying on for as long as it takes me to get on my feet and then they are passing on the reigns. Another year or two, maybe.

Now the one common element we have, other than the common ground, is we have 4 brick monument signs at the entrance to the neighborhood that have been neglected for decades. They are crumbling. I have had several masonry companies come out and they have all told be they are beyond repair and need to be rebuilt.

With the neighborhood dynamic, if we do an assessment the older folks are going to throw a fit because they don’t think they are going to be living there much longer and don’t want to invest in it, and we need 70% to approve assessments. The other trustees are pretty much telling me that the neighborhood will never approve an assessment to do anything, and even suggesting one will make people rally against us. In the last few years they had a scare where we thought we were going to have to pay $50k to fix a retention basin and the State was saying we had to do it but they couldn’t get an assessment passed. Luckily we have some attorneys in the neighborhood who were able to wiggle out of it somehow.

So now they want to use the entirety of the reserves to replace these monuments signs and then retire leaving with me with no cushion going forward with neighbors I don’t know and who have already proven they will not step up if anything bad happens.

My thought was that we use reserve money to take the old crumbling monuments down (a couple grand) and then hold a vote on an assessment for new ones. That way if people vote it down then I guess they don’t want them anymore. If they pass it, great! These monuments are the first thing people see so it is very visible and people complain about them all the time. I feel like if an assessment was going to be passed for something it would be this and it might be different than to pay for a retention basin people didn’t even know existed and doesn’t affect their properties at all.

However, I am brand new to this HOA thing, heck I’m new to homeownership and I guess there is an argument that these things are crumbling, it’s our duty to fix things, and we (potentially) have money on hand to do it. Maybe I’m wrong and being selfish to want hold on to money to make my life easier when these veterans leave me at the helm. Idk.

Would be very grateful of your thoughts and perspectives.