SaveTheHill.org

2024 Election Starts NOW, Candidate's Night Tue. Aug 20 by Kevin Wine, Aug 16, 2024, 11:47 PM, reply, branch, edit

The 2024 Election is underway and the ballot/proxy and candidate profiles should be arriving very soon. Earlier this year the Board pushed through another "rejection proxy" amendment to our bylaws which moved the Annual Meeting/Election date a month earlier. The election is now late September, rather than late October. The first attempt at holding the meeting will be on Tuesday September 17th. If you didn't receive your proxy/ballot yet, you can see a sample here (link may not work yet - still waiting on mailing):

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Proxies/Proxy2024.pdf
https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Proxies/Ballot2024.pdf

And the candidate profiles are here:

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Profiles/CandidateProfiles2024.pdf

There will be a "Meet the Candidates Night", which I believe is still scheduled for Tuesday August 20th, both in-person and via ZOOM.

There are 6 candidates this year - Fatma Ahsan, John Fakla, Zahid Khan, Patricia Mincarelli, Matthew Phillips, and Yuing (Mona) Wan. Anthony and I are endorsing Fatma, John, and Zahid, which entirely by alphabetical coincidence, are the first 3 candidates on the ballot. It has been 6 very long years of watching Society Hill and many of the things I spent a lot of time and energy on being slowly dismantled and destroyed. We are finally on the verge of getting things back under control.

I have been a little quieter than usual over the last few months as I'm still catching up on all the time lost to fighting this Board over The Hill, and then internally trying to help them make sensible decisions and stop wasting money since my return to the Board in April. It continues to be a very frustrating experience, and while I should probably just let it all go, there is too much unfinished business here for me to walk away.

We've gone backwards in so many ways. I won't go through the entire list again - I will just draw your attention to the picture of your Board "saving" you money again. To reduce the cost of their $500,000 Hampshire Ct. paving project they decided to remove the last 4 feet of sidewalk in front of the condo buildings on Hampshire. You will now get to walk through 4 feet of lawn, which will be dirt/mud soon enough, to get to your mailbox. This was done to avoid ADA accessibility requirements - if there is no sidewalk, then there is no need to comply. The ruling Board members thought they found a way to circumvent the bureaucracy, but can't see beyond their own cleverness and realize they just made the situation more hazardous, especially to any disabled residents who now have to navigate over uneven turf to get to their mail, or take a different route altogether. And what's going to happen in the winter? Are we shoveling the sidewalk to nowhere? Inevitably someone is going to try and go to the mailbox and slip/fall in the un-shoveled walk, or the final 4 feet of grass/mud/ice, or on the ice between the cars since they can't take the sidewalk anymore. Last year we just had a $500,000 settlement on a slip/fall from 2018 - which is one of the reasons the insurance premium is now DOUBLE. You would think the Board would want to take every step possible to reduce the risk, not increase the risk. This is pure bureaucratic stupidity, and adds yet another item to the list of problems they have created which will eventually have to be fixed properly. I would never even think to try something like this - I voted NO, but it passed anyway. This is precisely why we need to elect 3 more logical thinking Board members, urgently.

Have you looked behind buildings 43 and 44 on Harwick Court to see how the Board engineering geniuses "solved" the drainage problem?? Rather than simply scraping off a few inches of soil so the water will drain away from the buildings, they ADDED MORE SOIL (!) and constructed an elaborate system of 12" (serious overkill) drainage piping and an inlet and a huge open culvert (more overkill), behind both buildings. This had to cost 10 times what it would have cost to simply remove a few inches of excess soil. Ridiculous - again. And we are paying for this. I guarantee this is NOT how I would have solved this problem. Three votes for the right candidates and either of these nonsense solutions will not happen again.

I could go on for another 10 pages of all the things that have happened since April, but I assume the evidence speaks for itself. A few months ago the Board approved around $900,000 of capital repair and other work, some of which is getting underway just now, and coincidentally right around election time. A considerable portion of that expenditure was not really necessary in my opinion. Without getting into all the details and after seeing the current Board operate from the inside, I can only come to same conclusion as I have before - the bottom line is that the Board members really don't know what they are doing. They lack the background to form a conclusion on their own, and the lack the basis to differentiate between who they can trust and who they can't trust. This is not necessarily a critique on them individually - it's a group of volunteers, from a variety of backgrounds, making decisions about things that are often way outside their areas of knowledge or expertise. My standard analogy is when you bring your car to the shop. Most people don't know all the technical details of cars and engines, and are at the mercy of the shop. Same thing here - the Board is at the mercy of their service providers. Board members tend to trust the "professionals", and without the technical background to question their professionals, the board members do as they are advised. This would be fine if all these professionals were honest, but that has not been my experience. Many of them take advantage of the situation for their own personal gain. There are numerous examples of that here, most recently The Hill and the $2000 special assessment.

So is there any hope for a group of non-experts making decisions about something outside their expertise? Yes - they can ask precisely the right questions of the various professionals to verify their recommendations and corner them when they are trying to take advantage. But unfortunately very few people are good at this, and certainly very few board members are effective at grilling the professionals from what I have observed over the last 20 years.

Regarding the impending fee increases, there are two forces at play which are conspiring to DOUBLE our maintenance fees over the next several years. First, the insurance premium has doubled from $300,000 to over $600,000 (half of our total yearly operating budget!). This was mainly the result of two large claims - the fire in building 2 last year, which was around $1,000,000 to repair, and a slip and fall going all the way back to 2018, which finally settled a year ago for nearly $500,000. The Board has been advised multiple times that the premium will increase again for next year (~$700,000!?), and will remain high for a third year, after which the recent claims will be far enough in the past for the premium to drop back down. So it looks like we are stuck with a $700,000 insurance premium for another two years. HOWEVER, this ASSUMES there are no more disasters and large claims over the next two years! If anything else goes wrong, we are screwed. There is also the risk of getting dropped by all the insurance carriers (which apparently almost happened), in which case we have to buy insurance from the "surplus market" at premiums even more ridiculous than the current one (apparently double again - so well over $1,000,000/year).

In response to this, the Board is doubling down on its dryer vent inspection crusade. While dryer vents can lead to fires, they were not the cause of the building 2 fire. Dryer vents were the cause of the 2016 Hampshire Ct. fire, but there are many other ways of burning down buildings. The Board is fixating on only one of the possible causes, and just rolling the dice that some other source of ignition won't be next. A lot more could and should be done, urgently, to mitigate the fire risk, but there is no discussion or interest in doing anything about the numerous other fire risks, nor any discussion or interest in addressing the slip and fall risks. In fact, as the above mentioned picture shows, the board is taking steps in the opposite direction. If we really can't have any more slip and fall incidents, we are going to have to get much more serious about ice in the parking lots in the winter. The level of ice surveillance required to reduce the slip and fall risk to near zero would be very expensive, but it will need to be considered if the alternative is a $700,000 a year insurance premium forever.

The second force which is conspiring to raise our fees is the State Legislature. Earlier this year, they passed legislation, and our Governor signed it, to mandate that all condominium associations in NJ have a capital reserve study performed by a professional engineer every 5 years, and further mandate that the association fund the reserves as recommended by the engineer, and actually perform the work recommended in the study. The intent was to avoid a condo collapse disaster in NJ, similar to the one that occurred in Florida a few yeas ago. The problem with this legislation is that we are not a "steel reinforced concrete" high-rise condominium like the one that was neglected and collapsed in Florida. We are a "wood-frame low-rise condominium". Again, this goes back to a bunch of politicians, who are mostly from the legal profession, that know little or nothing about what they are legislating, and on top of it are probably under the influence of some outside forces. While this makes zero sense for us, we are still apparently obligated to comply with this new legislation, which means the reserve fund will have to be increased to $30,000,000 (yes - you are reading that correctly - thirty million dollars) over the next 30 years to fund every possible reserve study item fully and on schedule. The legislation puts a percentage cap (10%) on the amount of the yearly fee increase that the board can impose for the reserve fund, so they can't double the fees immediately to collect the additional $1,000,000 a year. They have to ramp up to that level over several years. So this, combined with the insurance premium, is where the $500/month fee forecast is coming from. I can't believe the legislature is not getting any pushback on another one of their crazy ideas, but at the moment this looks like the law even if they may have to amend it in the future. Some of the impact could have been reduced - as you might recall, from 2008 to 2018 we had some in-house "large capital project" capability, and were able to do this kind of work at-cost. However that capability has been systematically dismantled over the last 6 years, so our genius boards have once again thrown us to over-priced contactors wolves.

As a voting owner, there are very clear choices in this election, just like every election over the last 6 years. It's pretty clear that our backs are to the wall and the fess are going up - the question is by how much. You have the power to control what happens going forward, by putting people on the board that support the other members that know what they are doing and will get our situation back under control.

Kevin