By Keith Nette, Pine Mountain community
This has been a very divisive election season for Pine Mountain Club. We’ve had the “I want it all” vs. the “I don’t want any of it” groups going at it. It has developed hard feelings between friends and neighbors. All of that could have been avoided with a little better communication.
Throwing the Molotov cocktail
In my opinion, it all started on January 14 during the initial presentation by the planning committee of their proposed clubhouse remodel. The chairman of the PMCPOA board was asked if the proposal was going to be put up for vote to the membership. He responded, “No. It is a board decision.”
You might as well have tossed a gallon of gasoline on a bonfire. Instant explosion!
The other problem comes from the clubhouse question on “Official Ballot #1.” Many PMC residents support a remodel of the clubhouse, but not necessarily exactly what was proposed on January 14. The wording on the ballot: “Do you support the current renovation plans presented by the planning committee on January 14, 2017?” sounds as if it is “this plan, or no plan.” If you live off the hill and don’t read The Mountain Enterprise, don’t attend board meetings, didn’t attend the April 29 follow-up presentation by the planning committee and don’t follow certain Facebook groups, you have no idea what the ballot measure is talking about.
The second shoe drops
The opposing side isn’t guiltless in the verbal war. Numerous instances of misleading information have been put out by individuals, including one of the candidates at the “Meet the Candidates” forum and on social media. The idea that a lender will put a lien on everybody’s house if the POA borrows money for the clubhouse project is not completely correct.
If your assessments are paid up-to-date, you have no problem. If you don’t pay your assessments you will have a lien placed on your property by the POA, as they already do, or (depending on the type of financing) a lender may place a lien on your property for unpaid assessments. If your assessments are paid, no one is going to take your house away or keep you from selling it—but the unpaid assessments will have to be paid at the sale closing.
At the “Meet the Candidates” forum and on social media we’ve also heard “our expert said” the project will take $20 million to complete. When asked ‘who is your expert?’ no name or specific qualifications for ‘our expert’ were offered.
I sat down with an actual expert, who makes his living with large-scale construction. He came up with a guesstimate similar to that of the planning committee, $7 million. Please note that I call it a guesstimate, not an estimate. With this plan in the embryonic stage that it is in, a guesstimate is all any real expert would be willing to offer.
What really needed to be done before anybody started presenting numbers to the community was to get construction comps on similar private-sector projects. I mention “private-sector” because government construction projects may not provide accurate comparisons. My 25 years in government contracting taught me that anything a government agency does often costs three times what it should.
My bottom line
My wife and I urge you to vote ‘NO’ on this Ballot #1 question. We support a clubhouse remodel and the plan is an excellent starting point, but we need more facts and more community input, with more civil discussion between us as neighbors.
This is part of the June 9, 2017 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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