SaveTheHill.org

2025 Election Drama is ON by Kevin Wine, Aug 24, 2025, 1:18 PM, reply, branch, edit

The 2025 Election has started, a little bit ahead of the original schedule. For some unknown reason, copies of the candidate profiles have been distributed directly to some of the doors here in the complex. My original understanding was that everything was going to be mailed to all owners who did not opt-in for electronic voting, but I guess that plan changed and the board as a whole was not advised. All the profiles are available on-line here:

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Profiles/CandidateProfiles2025.pdf

Now I'm not sure if the proxy forms, ballots, and envelopes will also be delivered directly to some of the doors, or if they will be mailed, and if mailed, will they include another copy of the profiles. I'm also not sure if the profiles will be mailed to the non-resident owners who did not opt-in for electronic voting.

But whatever - those are all minor issues compared to the fact that one of the candidate profiles is missing from the packet!!

Somehow, the profile statement for Zahid Khan, which was emailed in two days prior to the Friday August 16th deadline, was "accidentally" missed. I really hope this was just an innocent oversight, but it is not hard to imagine why some of the other candidates would see a strategic advantage in sidelining one of our candidates, particularly Zahid. I am told it will be corrected, but unfortunately the paper mailing already went out so this is not going to be so simple to fix. In all the past elections, the names of the candidates and their profiles were released to the public immediately after the deadline, but this year it was decided to keep all that a secret, even after the deadline. If we were still following the original procedure this oversight would have been easily caught.

In the meantime, and to cut to the chase, I am supporting candidates John Fakla, Zahid Khan, and Vincent Marchitto this fall. As you will see from their profile statements, all three have either operations or business experience, both of which are desperately needed by this Board.

The main issue in this election is the run-away maintenance fees. As I mentioned previously, right after the 2024 election four Board members, which included President Mohiuddin Syed, voted in favor of the 41% fee increase which took us to $332/month this January. If they did that before the 2024 election, I'm sure the outcome of the election would have been very different. This is your chance to "Remember in September" and not let them do that to us again. Unchecked, there will likely be another increase because no amount of money is too much for them.

I'm afraid I cannot help but comment of some of the points made in the various candidate profiles, specifically with Mohiuddin Syed. A site plan application for remediating "The Mound" (aka "The Hill") in-place had already been submitted to the town in the summer of 2018 and deemed complete. It just need the application fee (about $1500 I recall) to finalize the submission. Board Dictator at that time Tong Zhou decided to unilaterally withdraw the site plan application, so that was the end of that. Tong Zhou cancelled the fix, and refused to listen to the warnings about what might happen as a result.

As mentioned before, the pond dredging was not "unpermitted". We had applied for and received multiple permits from the NJDEP for the pond work. I have explained this multiple times in the past, but it's not getting through. What he is complaining about is Township permits, which were eventually straightened out when the Township's landscape architect finally returned from vacation after no one responded to multiple messages we left for multiple weeks. The DEP violations were minor - the result of one of the disgruntled owners at that time being intentionally destructive. All the DEP issues were also in the process of being resolved in 2018 with further DEP permit applications, but again that was all cancelled by Dictator Zhou.

He "rebuilt the broken relationship" with the town by bending to their wishes to have The Mound removed entirely, rather than the site plan application to just keep it in place. This also served his ulterior political motive to "punish" all of us with the $1,200 special assessment so he could later use that as a political point and blame it on me. This was Dictator Zhou's original brilliant idea, carried forward by the next Dictator, and likely encouraged by the Town. We are all just the check-writing pawns in their game. This is reflective of the attitude by which the Board is currently lead, and whatever rebuilding of one relationship there might have been, if it even matters, was more than cancelled by the destruction of the relationship between this Board and the owners.

He neglected to mention in his profile the ridiculous over-engineered "solution" to the drainage problem behind buildings 43 and 44 on Harwick Ct., also as previously mentioned. This is another example of something that should have been very simple, turned into another major project. The simplest solution is often the best.

I don't know if you noticed, but the $1,200 special assessment we were charged was more than the cost of removing The Mound. The leftover $234k, which really should have been returned to the owners, was instead captured and re-routed to pay some of the increase in the insurance premium that year. So the claim that no special assessment was levied to pay the insurance premium increase is not entirely accurate.

The claim that Board members were paid for their volunteer Board work is totally wrong. He is obviously directing this toward me, during the time I was paid by the association to run the entire operations side. That was a full time position, often 50 to 60 hours per week, at considerably less pay than the current management position. He shouldn't be complaining. They love the "conflict of interest" claims, but none of this was a secret - my position was well advertised. The conflict of interest problem arises when trustees use their position to gain some advantage, and not declare it. For example, Tong and Linda Zhou running their rental unit management business on the side, while he was on the Board and she was employed by the Association. Did that ever get publicly revealed? No. And just for the record, I abstained from voting on all matters relating to my compensation, which I think had just one small increase in all of the 8 years. And the grass was green while I was here, and the pool was not green.

Finally, I can't end this without a comment on the "useless buried conduit". Remember that? We would have community internet access, for a FRACTION of what we are currently paying, if a handful of vicious and resentful individuals did not interfere with that plan. Where is the wireless FIOS? I looked in to this a year ago - all the bandwidth they had allocated for wireless home internet access has been used up. Only a handful of units have the service. It turns out you can still get wireless home internet access, but you have to setup a business home internet access account. There is still some bandwidth available there, but the cost is not much better than Cablevision, and it's slower and less reliable. So 7 years have passed since Tong Zhou dropped his cell phone on the table at the a board meeting and declared this will be all he needs for internet access in his entire house. It hasn't happened. It won't happen. The physical limitations of getting that much data to this many people make it prohibitively expensive bordering on impossible. He was probably reading 5G and 6G articles in the popular press, not knowing anything about digital communications and RF propagation and wireless networks, but still making proclamations and decisions impacting several hundred people. So the "useless buried conduit" might not be so useless after all, and meanwhile another 7 years have passed with me paying $250/month for cable internet!!! Thank you Dictators Zhou and Syed.

Kevin