OVA Support for OGC – a Common Sense Analogy
Photo: Creek leaving the east boundary of golf courses.
The analogy that follows is intended to provide a way of looking at whether or not the OGC request for OVA support is reasonable with respect to the values that we all share.
Consider a purely hypothetical situation where two adjacent 2- or 3-acre properties are owned by persons named Steve and Barbara. Maybe they are brother and sister, or maybe just neighbors. Steve’s property has his home, a pool and a separate garage. He knows that he will need to borrow money within a year or so to replace his roof, because he doesn’t have enough savings to cover it, and the garage and pool are aging and will require unknown amounts of money to keep them in good repair..
Barbara’s property has an attractive commercial campground, including trees and grass, and a small restaurant. Barbara’s property has never been very profitable, and with storm damage the previous year, she is wondering whether or not she will be able to survive the next unknown calamity, although income from the campground is rolling in fairly well this year. She would like to upgrade the restaurant, which has gone downhill in recent years, and she hopes that such an upgrade, along with needed campground maintenance, will help her operation to become more stable, but her savings are low and she doesn’t know where the money would come to do this work.
So Barbara comes to Steve with a proposition:
You have been getting a free ride from my property for many years. You have views of nice green space (the campground) which also provides a firebreak, should a wildfire come through; the creek that runs from your property through mine might back up and flood your property if I don’t keep it clear; and my restaurant provides a place where your visitors can come and eat. Furthermore, if I default and the bank takes over my property, the green space may be replaced by weeds and may eventually be developed with an apartment building, which would eliminate your views and downgrade your property value.
I think you owe me for all of this, and I would like you to help me out by giving me a monthly stipend for at least 5 years, which I will decide how to spend in order to improve my operation. I’m not willing to sell you anything of significant value to me, nor to make any significant change in my business plan, such as selling or leasing the restaurant. I might be willing to sell or lease to you small portions of my property that have no value to me, and I will happily rent you space in the restaurant whenever it is convenient for me, but none of these options will come close to giving me the funds I want from you in order to keep my business alive.
Steve wants to be a good neighbor (or brother), but he has his own problems to deal with.
So I have set the scenario. I’m not trying to be mysterious – Steve is obviously OVA, Barbara is obviously OGC. I believe that the analogy is fair. The major difference, in principle, between my scenario and the real OVA-OGC scenario is that OVA must tax its members in order to raise money, and the scenario does not address issues of fair representation and fiduciary duty of the OVA Board to OVA members. Ignoring those differences for the moment, I’d like each reader to ask himself:
- Does Barbara’s justification, for her contention that Steve has been receiving a “free ride,” make sense?
- Does it make sense that Barbara would expect Steve to share the cost of keeping the creek that flows through her property clear? Would she be willing to help Steve with his cost of keeping the creek clear within his property?
- Is it reasonable for Barbara to ask her neighbor/brother to give her a long-term monthly stipend for these purposes?
- Is it reasonable for Barbara, knowing that Steve will have to borrow money for a new roof fairly soon, to ask Steve to borrow more money in order to pay her a monthly stipend?
- If Steve provides Barbara with her desired stipend, will she be motivated to change her way of doing business, or will it simply enable her to perpetuate a business plan that has been less than successful for the past 20 years?
- If Steve gives Barbara the monthly stipend that she requests, and 2 or 3 years later she comes back and says that it wasn’t enough and she needs twice as much, should Steve then comply, or decide to refuse the request at that time? Will the precedent of having given her 2 or 3 years worth of her monthly stipend make it more likely that he will acquiesce to her later request, or will he decide to refuse or terminate all support, to avoid “throwing good money after bad”?
Back to the real world, where OGC has asked OVA to provide long-term monthly support in some form. I realize that no analogy is perfect, and certainly this one is not. But I hope this will give you something to think about, no matter what your opinion on the issue. If you are someone who thinks the OGC request is reasonable and important, the above analogy may not change your mind, but at least it may give you some understanding why many of us think the request is not reasonable.
Appreciate your efforts but much less so your analogy. Sometimes analogies aren’t really analogies because of the facts they fail to incorporate. And yes, you did explicitly state that you were not addressing all the numerous issues inherent in this OGC bailout. But I think that perhaps your analogy is quite impaired as a result.
See, neither Steve nor Barbara own the properties under discussion.
In the former case, only 1 divided by approximately 4500 or 0.02%, i.e., one-fifth of one percent. Steve is not legally authorized to either represent himself nor execute contracts as the owner of the OVA property.
Barbara’s fiduciary duties are only to OGC. Short of committing/contributing to fraud in the inducement of a contract with OVA, she may be acting within the scope of her fiduciary duties to OGC, however dishonorably and deceptively unfair/outrageous in the eyes of some/many/most of OVA’s real approximately 4500 owners.
Barbara et al.’s conduct is an internal OGC matter (with caveat noted above).
Steve, however, has aggressively sought to assume the authority of a fiduciary for the real Oakmont landowners— the people who own the other 99.98% of our community’s property.
His representations and actions MUST reflect his legal fiduciary duties, not those of “the” property owner. Steve has NO authority at all outside that of a fiduciary. And, of course, the latter is wholly defined and dependent on compliance with mandated responsibilities and permissible scope-of-action of a fiduciary.
If one so aggressively pursues authority, then, IMO, one simply must likewise accept — not evade or deny — the responsibilities and constraints dictated by law.
And yes, in ACTIONS, not just soothing-to-some-and-increasingly-alarming-to-others super-abundant VERBIAGE.
I found your final comment very insightful and helpful for all. It’s so easy to misread ‘motives’ during disagreements. This issue of OGC’s demanded bailout is no longer new. I think most people are not seeking to convert the other side, but rather to explain their own thinking/position to the other side. That way, there’s no big surprise for either side if an equitable resolution can only be achieved outside Oakmont in the judicial system.
Gerry — I have no particular disagreement with anything you said, except that I do think the analogy is useful. But it is limited to the question of whether or not it was a reasonable thing to do for OGC to make an approach to OVA in the way that they did. Their attitude of entitlement and claim that we have been getting some sort of free ride are both offensive to me, and I do not think their approach was reasonable.
You have correctly pointed out that there are other important issues to consider which are not addressed at all in the analogy, and you have criticized the OVA Board for their seeming rush to give OGC what they want. No argument from me!
Anyone who thinks it is in their best interest to financially support the OGC can certainly do so, because they play golf, their property is on one of the golf courses, or for any other reason, and would surely be welcome to contribute to paying the OGC expenses as they see fit in any amount and for as long as want.
No one has yet addressed the primary issue in my view- It is Unconstitutional for the OVA to require, (whether an OVA Board votes to do it, or a General Membership votes to do it,) any Oakmont resident to spend money on a business not owned by the OVA.