An ad from the April 2008 issue of the Big Canoe Smoke Signals:
WAKE UP BIG CANOE!!!
Changes are happening rapidly within our community. Are you aware of them? Here are just a few that should concern you.
Capital Initiation Fee (or “Exit Fee”)
You will be asked to vote on this in the near future. It would require a 1% fee for anyone building a new home, purchasing a lot, or reselling a lot and/or home.
Isn’t it already difficult enough to sell a home in Big Canoe?
Will the value of your property increase because of these changes?
What will the POA do with the extra funds raised?
Sconti complex
The current price tag is $10.4M (of which $6M will be borrowed) and this is more than double the cost when this project was first conceived in 2004.
Also the $25 per month Special Assessment is on target to raise $4.5M by the end of 2010 and initially this was planned to cover virtually the entire cost.
Did this get out of hand or what?
Did we not receive $3,300, 000 from our Insurance Company for the Sconti fire?
Amenity Reserve Fund
The 1999 Amendment to the Amenity Agreement put this Fund solely under the control of the full POA Board.
The intent was for the annual cash flow into this Fund ($1M per year and increasing) to become the Capital Reserve Fund that Big Canoe never had in order to care for aging infrastructure and reduce the pressure on annual assessment increases.
Has this become the Board’s “slush fund”?
What do you think is pledged against the $6M Sconti loan?
Wouldn’t you like to see an accounting of this Fund?
Governance Philosophy
The Board has hired a consultant (cost??) to help implement the “Policy Governance Model” form of governance.
One of the major tenets of this form is that the Board focuses only on “high level” goals and very few details, while the administration has great freedom in how to achieve those goals.
Isn’t this exactly the problem that produced the “Governance Crisis of 2003” when the General Manager resigned. the CFO and Accounting Manager were fired, and it took a full year to clean up the administrative mess?
There has to be a better solution between the extremes of current “micro-management” and “no control”.
The board has also chosen to represent the Corporation (the POA), and not the Property Owners, who actually are the POA. This is a very important distinction.
Please get interested, ask questions of your Board Members and attend the Town Hall meetings.
Your opinion counts.
Concerned Property Owners
4 users commented in " WAKE UP BIG CANOE!!! "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackWake up indeed. The anonymous Concerned Property Owners must have been Rip Van Winkle for the past three years. They try to inform but are sadly uninformed.
All property owners were mailed a document titled “A VIEW TOWARD THE FUTURE” in November 2005 before the vote on the Speciual Assessment.
This document stated that “Funding of the Amenities Improvement Program will be generated through several sources including general revenies, amenity and capital reserves, new debt, and a temporary Special Assessment.” The Concerned piece states that the Special Assessment was to cover virtually the entire cost.
They state that $6M will be borrowed–this is $1.5M less than the planned borrowing in the November 2005 mailing. It goes on and on.
Just asking….what is the agenda of the concerned property owners. Are they really so misinformed.
Concerned Residents,
All of your issues with the POA Board are well established and extremely important to Big Canoe’s financial future.
May I suggest some future actions?
1. Keep publishing your Big Canoe POA Board issues and any progress towards their resolution in the Smoke Signals. (It may be less expensive by publishing on the Internet.)
2. Hand out your “Wake Up Big Canoe” document as fliers at the next Town Hall meeting. (The next Town Hall Meeting is Saturday, April 26, 2008, Chapel Sanctuary, 10 A.M.)
3. Read your “Wake Up Big Canoe” document at the Town Hall meeting.
4. Form an independent POA Board Oversight Committee. Publish your meeting minutes and other results in the Smoke Signals and/or on the Internet.
5. Ask the community to help fund an independent “forensic” audit of the Sconti complex/rebuild and the POA’s financial records. Publish the audit results (in its entirety) in the Smoke Signals and/or on the Internet. (Big Canoers are adults; they can handle the truth.)
Thanks for stepping forward and caring about Big Canoe.
Another avenue for the Concerned Property Owners would be to change the Covnents and Restrictions (C&Rs) to include a few very important financial rules.
There must be a few rules in the C&Rs to tie down our financial expectations of the POA Board and its management team, and to punish financial wrongdoing. Don’t we punish the property owners who break the rules?
I propose the addition of rules to require competitive bidding on all projects greater than $50,000. This would include large projects like the Sconti. On small projects less than $1,000,000, every Big Canoe contractor should be given a chance to compete with the chosen few; and property owners would save thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And there must be a “favorable vote” from the POA Board for expenditures over $50,000. We must never again allow a Board President (even if he is the CEO) to be the “only” Board member to sign a few checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Our “Covenants and Restrictions” must contain a few firm financial rules to stop fiduciary lapses.
OK, Concerned Property Owners, can you make it happen?
Does anyone know what KPMG will charge to do a deep forensic audit of the Sconti complex costs, as well as, an audit of the POA’s financial health?
Other concerned property owners know that the POA Board President/CEO will fight tooth and nail against any group funding an independent KPMG forensic audit; but many of us want this independent audit and will help pay for it.
Would the Concerned Property Owners Group please pursue this course of action?