East Rec Overruns and OVA Plans for Future Development – Reasons for Optimism

A couple of days ago, Deborah Quam created a post on Nextdoor in which she linked to a Board meeting video from late 2018 in which Tom Kendrick and Iris Harrell described and defended the various cost over-runs and scope changes that led to the almost doubling from original estimates of the cost for remodeling the East Recreational Center. This video is available on the OVA web site; the presentation by Tom Kendrick begins at around 20 minutes into the video. She then goes on to briefly outline the current OVA planning efforts, which are led by the Oakmont 2030 project, with Tom currently a co-chair, and which are fully supported by Iris, who is a Board incumbent running for re-election.

The Current Planning Activity

The current activity is expected to culminate in a long-term plan for OVA facilities development. As Deborah points out, “No general membership preference questionnaire survey has been proposed, designed or scheduled, yet major planning and expenditures are underway.” She goes on, in comments, to provide a long list of add-on costs for the East Rec project, and the Oakmont 2030 Project List (14 candidate projects) which was created by our Long Range Planning Committee and provided to ArchiLOGIX to guide their development of central area site plans, under the $85 thousand contract recently awarded to them by OVA. (The Oakmont 2030 Project List is a very wide spreadsheet, so you will likely have to view it in full screen mode or zoom in to be able to read it.) Some of the 14 proposed projects would be inexpensive to implement, but others would obviously cost millions of dollars (e.g. “Purchase of Build new OVA Admin Office”, description “Purchase 10,000 square foot building at Oakmont Drive & Stone Bridge Drive, or build a new building”).

Reality, Reasons for Optimism, Danger If Board Direction Doesn’t Change

In response to the horrible failure of the Candidates Night event to address significant questions about the current Board’s direction (which were submitted but not asked during the event), many have expressed pessimism about OVA’s future. Statements of the nature of “it’s a done deal” and “it’s depressing and a lost cause” have been popping up on Nextdoor. Such comments are what stimulated me to write this editorial, because I believe that there are reasons for optimism that these expensive and divisive project plans will never come to fruition.

The current OVA Board effort is to come up with a long-term plan which the current Board *hopes* will guide Oakmont into the future. But as we have seen, any new Board made up of different directors may choose to either ignore, defer or cancel plans drawn up by a previous Board — it happened as recently as 2018, when the new Board completely dropped the previous Board’s go-ahead approval for a plan to upgrade Berger.

At worst, the current effort will waste a couple of hundred thousand dollars, which is bad but which we can afford, in coming up with a plan that is never followed. When this plan is complete, if Oakmont as a whole does not approve of it, hopefully we will throw out its perpetrators at the next election! At its best, the plan they come up with will meet with general approval and will serve its intended purpose. Most likely, reality will be somewhere in between.

After coming up with the plan, the Board will hold town halls to sell Oakmont on its desirability, with little pretense of fairly representing any opposition to elements of the plan. But individual projects, if large and expensive, will meet opposition and their implementation may, even under current rules, trigger a mandatory election to approve an over-20% dues increase (again!). The danger is that the Board at the time, like the 2016 Board who tried to jam the pickleball court project down our throats, may find a way, most likely using a long-term loan, to do the project without any OVA election for approval. The higher our dues go before project start, the easier this will be, because the 20% threshold will be measured against a higher baseline dues rate.

Conclusion

If you oppose multi-million dollar projects to expand OVA facilities, as do I, it is important for future affordability of Oakmont to stop plans for such projects as early as possible. The sooner that we replace the big spenders with more prudent directors, like candidates Oliver, Klein and Gladstone, the better chance we have for an alternative long-term plan that does not include grandiose but expensive new facilities.