Us vs. Them

At March's open board meeting, the open forum portion of the meeting was dominated by discussion of the budget discussion of cuts to the budget overwhelming demand not to cut items from the budget... Well, that and a desire not to raise assessments.

I'm reminded of a post I wrote back when I left the board in 2007. Specifically, I'm referring to the need to find solutions, not more problems. In my opinion, the association has severely mismanaged its reserves and really, its finances in general, over the past few years. Currently, the association's reserves are just over 20% funded; it has "borrowed" approximately $30,000 from its reserves with no plan to pay it back; and its expenses exceed its revenue by almost $15,000 per year. In the face of all of this, homeowners are still demanding that no services be cut and dues not be raised. It's grotesque in its absurdity, and the disconnect would be hilarious if it weren't leading directly to the bankruptcy of this association.

As if this isn't bad enough, anger at the situation is being directed at the current board and the belt-tightening we all now face as if these problems merely appeared out of thin air and were not a direct result of financial mismanagement by previous boards of directors and the lackadaisical attitude the rest of the homeowners took toward the matter.

To paraphrase Walt Kelly: I have seen the problem, and it is us.

So, let me reiterate a couple of points from that previous post:

A homeowners association is exactly what its name implies. It is an association of owners of a given set of homes. All homeowners have an equal right (and in my opinion, responsibility) to participate. The board merely acts to handle the day to day business of the association and see that business gets done in the event that homeowners do not participate (usually the result of apathy, of which there appears to be a great amount). Homeowners who don't speak up should not be surprised when the board acts in a manner inconsistent with what they might have done.

and

The board of directors of an association has a fiduciary duty to the association, not its individual members. Decisions are made in the interests of the association. While the board should make an effort to be as accommodating as possible, eventually unpopular action may become necessary. This can have a disproportionately negative effect on individual homeowners, but that does not automatically make the decision a product of malice.

Let me also make a related point, explicitly. With regard to this problem, prior to now there was no "us", and there was no "them". There was only "we", and by "we", I mean every homeowner in this association. We are responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. The board of directors may have made the decisions that brought us to this point, but none of the rest of us tried to stop them. We are now responsible for and bear the burden of rectifying this situation. The board of directors consists solely of homeowners within this association, and decisions that it makes to cut services and/or raise dues affect its members just as much as they do other homeowners.

We were the problem, and now we must solve it. There will certainly be disagreements about how to go about finding the solution(s), but the only "us" and "them" distinction that now exists is between those who are working toward the solution and those who are not.