What an evening! Yes, more people came to the Board meeting than - TopicsExpress

What an evening! Yes, more people came to the Board meeting than ever. They had set up seating in the vestibule. Unfortunately the sound from the speakers did not carry much past the first doors so I couldn’t hear all the impassioned speeches, but heard enough to know how much people care to make our community special and to improve financial decisions and governance. Kay Lopez and Inge Rankin announced their candidacy for Directors on the HVL Board. There were two main issues of interest to me. The first was the budget for the two recall petitions. The proposed budget is for $20K for both combined. But the actual petition certification process comes on like a big muddied mess. I assumed each recall would be handled separately, if only to be fair. But no, both sets of petitions were sent to the same CPA firm, apparently at the same time. They did a 20% test of signatures and found 4 discrepancies each so they decided to check all the signatures. But the folks making the phone calls to signers weren’t sure if they were calling for the Bill Waite recall or the Steven Greenberg recall. At least that’s what I understood, so someone could have said “no, I didn’t sign a recall petition for Steven” when actually the caller was verifying the signature for Bill Waite—so he would get the no instead and that would be an invalidated signature. Cindy Spears has promised to clarify the situation. I wonder if they will have to start from scratch. There’s more, but let’s see what shakes out. The other issue had the Board voting on whether or not to remove the commercial kitchen from the Community Center and take it to the Greenview. Those opposed were saying this sounds like just another move to advance rebuilding the Hartmann buildings. Michele compared it to a Trojan Horse with the Taj Mahal tucked inside. Some wondered why this issue was being brought up now. They went round and round with the pros and cons, but in the end the Board still voted yes with a vote of 3 no to 4 yes. Bill Waite made the fourth yes vote. As you might imagine, I can’t give you enough details: the heated exchanges, Herb’s effort to take the vote off the table, Bill Waite shutting down speakers and being sarcastic, people desperately holding up their hands to be allowed to speak, and then being shut down. We had several requests for surveys and votes, especially the Food & Beverage survey. Apparently that one is going out to the community tomorrow via monkey survey online. It has to be finished within two weeks and that information has to get to the architects before their next presentation. That meeting will be on August 16. At 10 am will be a meeting about the recall—they expect to have final numbers then and to let us know if the BOD will accept each recall or not. Then at 2 pm we will have another one of those meetings to see the architects’ plans. I hope many people write in about their own experience to flesh out what I have given you here. As Will Tuttle said, this is like a birth, it always comes with pain and turmoil and that’s what we’re going through now.