The 2024 OVA Board election was record-breaking. The number of ballots cast (1,916) was greater than in any Board election ever, even including the highly divisive pickleball Board election of 2017, and the voter participation was 59.4%, approximately duplicating the 2017 turn-out.

Even more impressive was the margins by which the three new directors out-distanced their opponents. The lowest vote count of the winners (Jerry Gladstone, 58.9% of ballots cast) out-distanced the highest of the losers (Iris Harrell, 38.6%) by over 20 percentage points. To call this a landslide is to understate the facts. There could hardly have been a stronger vote of no confidence in the recent Board direction!

So what should the new OVA Board of Directors understand from this election?

I believe that a key factor in this election was the endorsement of the three winners by the Oakmont Grassroots Organization (OGO), an informal group of residents who came together because of our common judgement that the OVA Boards of recent years have exceeded their authority and ignored the desires of the majority of OVA members. The new Board should very seriously consider the priorities expressed by OGO, and act to remedy the deficiencies identified by OGO.

Affordability

From 2018 thru 2024, the total OVA dues increase has been 61.2% excluding the estimated $17/member/month increase to fund the golf club purchase. Of course, there are various causes for this large dues increase, including fire prevention and insurance premium increases, but this doesn’t help OVA members whose incomes went up no more than inflation (26.8% over the same period).

It is impossible not to speculate that some of this enormous dues increase served the purpose of inflating OVA income (almost entirely made up of dues) in order to eventually be able to expand facilities in major ways, as various directors have expressed an intent to do over the years. This was further supported by the thrust of the Oakmont 2030 effort, which from its beginning has emphasized perceived needs and largely ignored potential costs. This week’s town hall seemed to me to be a litany of such “needs”, including a number for which there is no evidence of Oakmont interest. To their credit, a number of users identified cost-effective ideas for meeting these “needs”, but nowhere was there any official guidance to avoid solutions whose realization would require multi-million-dollar funding. Furthermore, the participants in the user groups are obviously a small minority of the most vocal OVA members and include those who would be most likely to support facilities expansions. To many of us, it looks like an effort by those in charge of Oakmont 2030 to build a case that Oakmont supports major facilities expansion when, in fact, there is absolutely no evidence that a vote of the membership would approve, for example, a ten million dollar construction project, as some of the project concepts would entail.

Oakmont residents, in general, are not as stupid or ignorant as some of our leaders apparently believe. We have observed that, while directors pay lip service to fiscal responsibility and deny any intent (within their tenure) to fund major capital improvements, the evidence from dues increases and from the willingness to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for planning alone, along with various expressions over the years of a desire for a major auditorium here or a sports complex there, indicate that they are not as fiscally conservative as we would like them to be. This insensitivity to the sentiments of most OVA members, who just want to keep things as they are and to be able to continue to live in Oakmont without substantial erosions of their standard of living by dues increases, led us to vote overwhelmingly for candidates who promised to make OVA affordability a real priority.

Membership Empowerment

Over the past several years, there have been repeated pleas for OVA to update the 2015 Voices of Oakmont survey, and to allow membership votes or referendums before committing to major capital improvements. These have fallen on deaf ears. Directors have disparaged surveys, in general, although the 2015 survey was well done and very informative about the needs and desires of OVA members. As for membership votes, some directors have gone so far as to make the ridiculous claim that allowing them would violate their fiduciary duty to make all meaningful decisions for OVA. See Democracy in Oakmont: The Roles of Membership Surveys and Votes for details of this issue.

As with the affordability issue, the OVA membership has become aware of these tendencies among OVA directors, through the efforts of myself and other OGO members. Simply put, the overwhelming rejection of the status quo this year is a statement that such elitism, and the refusal to allow the membership to take part in major OVA decisions, are no longer acceptable, if they ever were.

How the OVA Board Should Respond

The key concepts are affordability and consent of the governed. Here are some actions the Board could take to regain the confidence of the OVA membership:

• Make affordability an explicit priority during creation of each year’s budget. Aim to keep dues inflation around the same as general inflation, and if you cannot do that, then use a President’s Message or other means to explain to the membership the reasons for an extraordinary dues increase. Such excessive dues increases should be acknowledged as a failure, not simply justified.
• Modify the thrust of the Oakmont 2030 effort to include fiscal constraints. Many useful ideas have come out of the effort, and those which are fiscally prudent should be encouraged and supported. Ideas which are obviously over-ambitious should be identified and thrown out, without wasting further effort on them.
• Replace the phrase in the Board Mission Statement “to have Oakmont perceived as a premier active adult retirement community in comparison with other similar retirement locations” with something like “to have Oakmont perceived as an affordable and democratic active adult retirement community in comparison with other similar retirement locations”. I think this is important, because I believe that the Boards of the past 6 years have taken “premier” all too seriously — Oakmont is not “premier” and never will be, no matter how much lipstick we put on the pig! More specifically, I don’t think that most members want it to be “premier”. We want it affordable and nice and friendly and well-maintained, within a reasonable budget, and we want an explicit voice in major decisions affecting dues increases and the future of Oakmont.
• Direct the Long Range Planning Committee to plan and execute a new comprehensive membership survey, both to update the results of the 2015 survey and, perhaps more important, to gauge the priorities of the membership with respect to issues that have come to the fore since then, including fire prevention, golf course management, the Oakmont 2030 effort, and OVA facilities expansion.
• Add to the Oakmont BOD Project Oversight Process phases 2 and 3 a requirement for a referendum to approve or disapprove of any new capital improvement that might cost millions of dollars or might change OVA in a way that many members would find unacceptable (e.g. pickleball courts next to the central swimming pool). [Personally, I would like to suggest a ranked-choice vote to choose among responsible alternatives.]
• Restart the Bylaws revision process, to include the following specific amendment goals:
  • Allow amendments to be approved by a membership vote with a practical threshold for quorum and required threshold for approval, while preserving the ability of the membership to initiate amendments.
  • Require a membership vote for capital improvement projects whose cost will exceed some threshold (say 15% of the annual budgeted gross expenses of the Association, which are currently around seven million dollars), regardless of whether the expenditure is made within one year or spread over many years through use of a loan.
  • Require a membership vote before taking out a loan that is in excess of some threshold (e.g. $3 million) or has a term of 5 years or more, unless the Board declares an emergency (e.g. to respond to a natural disaster).

I believe that the above actions would go a long way toward remedying the Oakmont controversies of the past few years and toward restoring the faith and confidence of the OVA membership in our Board.