OPINION: Political Divides in Oakmont
This article identifies two major divides in Oakmont politics, which I call Maintainer vs Builder, and anti-democrat vs democrat (I use lower case to make it clear that I am not talking about the Democratic Party or its principles or members). If these are key issues for you, I suggest you read on, decide where you fall on these issues, and take this into consideration when you vote for OVA directors this month!
Most issues in Oakmont have a large degree of agreement among the members of the Oakmont Village Association (OVA), the home owners association that controls the recreational facilities, including the golf courses, and a large amount of common property. We all want continued maintenance of existing facilities, safety against wildfires, safe evacuation routes when the need arises, and continued support of our myriad clubs and organizations.
But two major issues divide us, as becomes apparent whenever we have an election for the OVA Board of Directors. (For this year’s election, the ballots are in the mail and must be returned no later than April 7.) The first of these issues pits those who prioritize continued affordability against those who say that we need to plan for a major expansion of facilities to support our ever-increasing set of clubs and organizations. I will refer to this issue as one of Maintainers vs Builders.
The second issue pits those who believe that OVA should continue to operate on a corporate model, where the Board is elected by Oakmont owners but thereafter gets to make all decisions, including major ones, without having to get further approval from the owners; against those who would like to see the governing documents amended to require a membership vote on the largest decisions, such as a decision to build a new major facility (a large “capital improvement”) or to take a large loan on behalf of OVA, which will raise dues in order to service the debt over many years, or both. I will refer to this issue as one of anti-democrats vs democrats (lower-case, to make it clear that I am not talking about the Democratic party).
I wrote about this years ago (see Visions of Oakmont), but I think the way I am presenting the information here will make it simpler and easier to understand. To elucidate the differences, I will identify sets of beliefs that I believe characterize the extremes of each issue:
Builders:
- OVA clubs and organizations have multiplied over the past decade or two, so there is now too much competition for existing facilities – we need to expand facilities to better serve them.
- OVA’s Board Mission Statement & Goals states that one of the Board’s missions is “to have Oakmont perceived as a premier active adult retirement community in comparison with other similar retirement locations, thereby contributing toe the well-being of the residents and to the preservation of property values.” We need to take this mission seriously, and to have Oakmont evolve in order to attract future buyers and to maximize our property values.
- In spite of the increase of OVA dues from $51/member/month in 2015 to $128.50/member/month this year, OVA dues are still quite cheap. We can and should raise dues over the coming years, to be able to realize expansion to meet our growing needs.
Maintainers:
- All existing OVA facilities should, of course, be well maintained, as required by law, with occasional redecoration and upgrades as required for ADA compliance, etc. Nobody is in favor of deferring maintenance on our facilities!
- The OVA facilities have served us well and continue to do so. Our population is actually declining, so there is no need for significant expansion of our facilities.
- OVA should encourage facilities scheduling during less popular hours and, if that is not enough, should consider limiting the number of clubs or the amount of service available to each. If we had 1/3 fewer clubs, we would still have more than almost any comparable community.
- Contrary to claims of the Builders, OVA dues are not “cheap”. A couple in one of our subHOAs may pay over $600/month in HOA dues in 2025. Furthermore, it is apples-and-oranges to compare our dues with those of Rossmoor, one of the most expensive HOAs in California and one in which far more services are provided.
- The dues increases that would be necessitated by construction of large new facilities would be an unacceptable burden to seniors living on pensions, and in some cases would threaten their very ability to remain in Oakmont. This is especially true for elderly women living alone, who are a substantial fraction of Oakmont residents and who frequently have lower income than couples or men.
democrats:
- Common sense and American tradition says that our governing body, the OVA Board, should represent the will of the voters. Even in representative democracies, there are frequently situations in which popular votes are required, as a check against the governing body losing sight of what their constituents want.
- The OVA Bylaws should have been amended long ago, to require a membership vote before construction of any new facility that will cost more than some threshold (perhaps somewhere between $500k and $2M), or before obligating OVA to repayment of a loan whose initial principal will exceed some threshold, or both.
- The lack, of any way for the OVA membership to veto Board decisions that they don’t like, has caused too much dissension and resentment in Oakmont over at least the past decade. If we knew that the Board could not misuse their power to hijack our future, then most of the dissension would melt away.
Anti-democrats:
- OVA, from its start, has had a representative form of governance, with directors elected to the OVA Board and the Board making all minor and major decisions for OVA. This has worked well and there is no valid reason to change it.
- The Board, because of their fiduciary duty under the law, should be making all decisions for OVA, both large and small. The Board, not the membership, is responsible to determine what is in the best interests of the community.
- The Board, though their regular attention to OVA affairs and their interaction with OVA staff, is more qualified than the membership to make decisions for the community.
Below, I will identify some individuals who are either current or former OVA directors or candidates, whom I believe fall into each category, or into the middle between the extremes. I also put myself into this table. Current Board candidates are indicated in bold. For Maintainers vs Builders, the middle category includes those who either favor the Builder extreme but with fiscal restraint, or want to decide on a case-by-case basis. For Anti-democrats vs democrats, the middle category includes those who might go along with such Bylaws amendments, but who are unenthusiastic or suspicious of the encroachment on Board power. I made sure to include all current candidates — I put a question mark after Neill Ray’s name because, although I am fairly sure that he is in the Builder camp, he didn’t make it clear at Candidates Night whether he is a democrat or anti-democrat (and he failed to respond to the Candidate Survey). If a current OVA director is not in the table, it is because either I don’t have enough information on which to base an opinion, or they have shown themselves to be unreliable, first seeming to be on one side and then switching to the other.
| Maintainer | Builder | ||
| Anti-democrat | Tom Kendrick Iris Harrell | ||
| Neill Ray (?) | |||
| democrat | Robert Williams | Tim Nelson Karl Turner John DeGroot Matt Oliver Jerry Gladstone Bruce Bon | Jess Marzak Jeff Neuman |
I apologize to anyone named if you feel that you are in the wrong box in this table. I encourage you to express yourself about this in the comments, and, if you convince me that I have misrepresented your position or history, then I will alter the table accordingly.
I have to say that I am very pleased that democratic reform has finally risen in visibility and that essentially all of this year’s candidates claim to support it. It gives me hope that, eventually, our Bylaws will be amended to ensure that the Board must get the membership’s permission before spending on ten million dollar new building projects!
Thanks Bruce, This is a badge of honor for me.
Thank you for an interesting article, Bruce. Having attended a number of meetings and greets, I would have to say that Neill Ray has consistently espoused a middle way on both of these issues, so I am surprised that you did not place him in that category. Also, based on the publicly discussed and more accurate parsing of census data at a meeting you attended, I am surprised that you say that a substantial percentage of Oakmont owners are elderly women living alone on fixed incomes that are, basically, poor. Yes, women, in total, are 67% of our members. But the percent of owners with annual incomes under $75,000 a year – not taking into account assets that may well include homes owned outright – is about 13 percent. Not all of those are little old ladies on low fixed incomes. And I believe there are mechanisms to protect truly low-income members from increases in dues that place them in hardship. The census data reveals that we are an upper middle class community. Also, when one third of the owners in this community are banned from voting, as only one vote is permitted per household, talking of “democracy” by public voting is a bit specious. Maybe your “anti-democrats” are actually more democratic than the “democrats.” Also, surveying and voting is expensive – tens of thousands of dollars are involved in each instance. With elections being held each year, we already have a mechanism much less expensive and faster, for getting our spending preferences expressed politically. I am certainly not opposed to votes of the people – as long as it is all the people. And I have spent my entire career working for affordable housing for very poor people. Can we not work together to achieve a mutually agreeable manner of improving Oakmont? Telling interest groups that they have no entitlement to use facilities is no way to solve this problem.
I did not say that elderly women living alone in Oakmont were poor, only that they were likely to have lower incomes than men or couples, and I don’t think that anything in the LRPC study said otherwise. Our monthly dues are the same amount for every member, which means that they constitute a larger percentage of income for single women than for men or couples. I don’t pretend to know how many Oakmonters would actually have to move out if dues were doubled again, as they were in the last ten years. But regardless, I don’t believe that dues should go up so dramatically without the explicit consent of those of us who will have to pay for it. We gave that explicit consent in 2019, and that is good. But what’s wrong with requiring that the membership must consent for future expenditures of similar magnitude to the golf course purchase, even if they don’t trip the 20% dues increase threshold that, by law, requires a vote?
The issue of one vote per 2-person household or two is completely separate and not so clear cut as you claim. Essentially, OVA is a corporation in which the owner(s) of each home owns a single share, and the voting rules follow that — one vote per share. The operational expenses are paid by dues, which are allocated per person, which is a fair way because the demand on OVA facilities and services are, on average, twice as high for two people as for one. Voting determines how the corporation is governed. Dues are more like a monthly fee for a health club. Another consideration, should we decide to change our voting rules to allow two votes per two-person household is that it would constitute a major shift in voting power from single people, who own the majority of homes in Oakmont, to couples, who would then have the majority of voting power — it is not at all obvious to me that this would be more democratic! I do think that this is an issue that should be put to a vote by the OVA membership to allow us to choose which way it should be, and that should happen in the course of the Bylaws revision process that is (very slowly) underway. I am not sure which way I will vote if/when it comes up.
About the cost of surveys — relative to the money spent on facilitators for Oakmont 2030 public meetings, I think the cost/benefit of a comprehensive survey would be much, much higher, and it is somewhat absurd for those who think that the expenditure for facilitators was justified to turn around and say that the expenditure needed for a survey that would reach all OVA members is not justified. Besides that, I don’t think that a survey has to be expensive. Once a year, as part of the ballot mailing, a few questions carefully selected by the LRPC or the Board, could be included. The questions should be selected to be relevant to the most important or expensive issues that the Board will have to make decisions about in the coming year. In other words, we don’t have to repeat the 2015 survey in the same way, in order to solicit the opinions of Oakmonters on important issues. But we DO have to use a process that reaches all OVA members, rather than just a select few (e.g. club leaders) or even asks the opinions of those who are not OVA members about the wants of those who are not yet OVA members (e.g. realtors). The annual election for the Board is a very poor way of “getting our spending preferences expressed politically” because who gets elected is more determined by who runs, i.e. who is able and desires to control OVA, than it is by our preferences. I am not implying any nefarious motivation on the part of any candidates, but I am saying as directly as I know how that the result is not reliably reflective of the policy opinions of the bulk of OVA members. And the actions of the Board would be more likely to be responsive to the opinions of the OVA membership if the Board had more accurate knowledge about their policy opinions.
“A couple in one of our subHOAs may pay over $600/month in HOA fees in 2025.” While you use the word fees it is within the context of rising dues. A substantial portion of the $600/mo cited above is for home and property expenses—water, sewer, landscape maintenance, exterior painting and insurance—that all homeowners have.
A problem exists and deserves our attention. But lumping dues and normal expenses together begins the conversation from a tilted point of view imo.
I don’t consider things like water and sewer to be part of HOA fees, unless, in fact, the HOA pays for water and sewer, which could be the case but usually is not. In any case, I was just using the term “HOA fees” to be synonymous with “HOA dues”, so I changed it to the latter to be perfectly clear!
I’m aware of differences in what sub-HOA dues cover, but believe most cover water and sewage. It makes sense in units with large open spaces. My point is that rather than an added burden they are just other way to pay the same expenses all homeowners pay.
Got it!
In my subHOA, there is a water bill for the common area, and it is one of our largest expenses, the others being landscape maintenance and exterior painting every 10 years, but everybody gets a separate water and sewer bill. Insurance is now up to the homeowners, except for a relatively small subHOA D&O policy that is billed once a year separately from our dues. And our subHOA dues are relative cheap, because we don’t have as much to take care of as some, at $250/mo, which then adds up to a total HOA dues cost of “only” $507/month for a couple. My insurance premium is now much more than it was when there was a subHOA fire policy, but now I have control of the details and, more importantly, if I was completely burned out, I could take the payout, sell the lot and walk away — under the subHOA policy, the only way the insurance would pay would be to reimburse rebuilding costs, thus tying me down for however long the rebuild would take.
Thanks. It’s good to hear some subs are making changes. I probably don’t fully appreciate the hurdles to merging, but in very small subs it looks like the only solution. Does every home have a water meter in your sub?
We are small (but not the smallest) with 12 single family homes and one triplex. The single family homes each have a water meter, and there is one meter for the triplex, with the bill divided 3 ways.
My subHOA has amended its CC&R’s several times in the past decade, the first time to lower the threshold for amendment from 75% of members to a simple majority of members. Then exclusive use of common area easements, rental limitation (and revised when the law forced another change), and finally to give the HOA Board the option to switch from HOA fire insurance to individual owner fire insurance, which they did as soon as the amendment was past. We are lucky that we are not in the WUI and our common property is relatively small and manageable, or our dues would be a lot higher.