Isabel Brecheen-Castaneda paid her HOA fees in 2025 but the HOA company kept trying to collect them. CALL KENS got it sorted out.
SAN ANTONIO — Isabel Brecheen-Castaneda paid her HOA fee in May of 2025. It was $380. She paid through the same PayHOA portal homeowners used the previous year.
But then, the homeowner said, a few months later an HOA bill for $380 showed up in the mail. She was baffled.
“I was like, there’s no way. I already paid that!” Brecheen-Castaneda said. “Why am I getting a bill?”
The homeowner started reaching out to her volunteer HOA board to find out what was going on but couldn’t get an answer. She also knew the HOA had hired a management company, JellyBird, earlier that year so she looked for a way to reach JellyBird.
When that didn’t work, she filed a complaint against JellyBird on the Better Business Bureau website. Finally, a JellyBird representative got back to her.
“The next day, Johnny from JellyBird reached out to me,” Brecheen-Castaneda said. “He called me.”
The JellyBird representative looked into her issue and got her set up on the JellyBird app. Finally, in October, the JellyBird representative was able to confirm that Brecheen-Castaneda had indeed already paid her fee.
In fact, he wrote in an email, “I was able to confirm a payment”, “you are good to go,” and “Use this email as proof and confirmation that I see the payment was made.”
She was not good to go. In December she started to again get bills trying to collect the money. Now the bill included another $70 in fees.
Brecheen-Castaneda called KENS 5.
“I was mad. Why is this not taken care of?” she said. “I just need help.”
KENS 5 drove to the local JellyBird office to try to get some answers but there were no local JellyBird employees in that office.
Fortunately, JellyBird had sister-company called “Spectrum Association Management” in the same building. Spectrum Association Management Client Relations VP Cyd Reuter met with KENS 5 and offered to look into the issue and try to help the Homeowner.
Reuter quickly looked into the issue and soon found the cause of the problem. Reuter found out that HOA members should have been paying HOA fees in the JellyBird app by May of last year. Unfortunately, the local volunteer board had not closed the PayHOA payment portal which homeowners were accustomed to. Brecheen-Castaneda paid in that portal and the funds went to the wrong account.
Reuter had to contact the local HOA volunteer board members and explain how to fix this. She sent KENS a statement that red in part:
“JellyBird is taking swift action by coordinating with the Board to ensure these funds are transferred to the correct operating account. Please know that all fees related to this transaction have been waived, and the homeowner’s account is on hold during this process. No further action is required from the homeowner at this time. Our team is reaching out to this owner and reviewing to ensure payment issues are resolved.”
Reuter also called the homeowner. A few days later Brecheen-Castaneda’s HOA account was corrected. The fees were now waived and her account showed it had been paid in 2025.
“It was a relief knowing that this was finally taken care of after waiting months to get it taken care of,” Brecheen-Castaneda said. “(There was) an actually person that could tell me how it was going to be handled and how it was going to be corrected. After someone stepped in above JellyBird it was finally taken care of.”
Reuter later told KENS 5 that the previous JellyBird representative had also found that same issue but it was up to the local HOA board to move the collected fee to the correct account and fix the problem.
Brecheen-Castaneda is thankful Reuter stepped in and solved the problem. She’s also glad she called KENS 5.
“Had I not reached out to KENS 5 for help we still wouldn’t know what to do,” she said.
If you have a problem like this, we want to help you fix it! In our series, Call KENS, we do our best to solve problems for our viewers. The number to call is 210-470-KENS, or fill out the form on this page.