OPINION: Who Should the OVA Board Serve?
There are innumerable ways of categorizing the 4700 or so members of the Oakmont Village Association (OVA), but for the purposes of this article, I will consider just two categories:
- Inactive members – OVA members who do not make use of OVA facilities or participate in OVA politics, other than occasionally attending a town hall on some hot topic (e.g. fire safety during fire season) and possibly voting in the annual OVA Board of Directors election (over a 13-year period, 2009-2021, voter participation ranged from 38% to 47%, except for the hotly contested elections of 2017 and 2018, when it reached a high of 60%).
- Active members – OVA members who are more active, through participation in recreational and enrichment activities, service on committees, attendance at OVA Board meetings, etc.
What proportion of OVA members are active?
As George McKinney, a long-serving and respected member of the OVA Long Range Planning Committee, observed recently in a Nextdoor thread, “The 2015 survey was done very professionally and used multiple methods of reaching residents. In a large population, a return of 35% is more than enough unless you want to pay for door-to-door canvassing. It gives a 95% accuracy level.”
While there has been no effort to identify what percentage of OVA members fall into each of these groups since The Voices of Oakmont survey in 2015, there is no strong reason to believe that today’s Oakmont would differ a lot.
But we are all 9 years older, and there has been substantial Oakmont turnover during the ensuing years. Furthermore, the context has changed. Since 2015, we have had multiple wildfires, the pickleball issue was resolved, and OVA purchased the Oakmont Golf Club. All of this means that our issues and priorities have changed, so The Voices of Oakmont survey, or something like it, really should be repeated. A typical frequency for conducting member surveys range from 2 to 5 years. This interval allows enough time to implement changes or initiatives based on the feedback received, while also providing an opportunity to gauge evolving needs and priorities within the community.
I was surprised, in reviewing the 2015 survey, that 68% of residents surveyed said they were somewhat or very active, and only 32% were not very or not at all active. And the most active age group, at 77%, was the 76 – 85 year-olds, not the younger residents. 71% of the 2015 residents belonged to at least one club, and 33% volunteered in Oakmont. 93% of residents made at least some use of indoor facilities, and 73% made use of outdoor facilities (pools, ball courts, etc). I would have guessed that the inactive member group would be larger, although a third (in 2015, at least) of OVA members were not very or not at all active.
Servant leadership
Servant leadership, as far as I know, was introduced to Oakmont by Steve Spanier, who wrote this President’s Message about it in mid-2018. This seems to have become a guiding philosophy of the Board since 2018, with a strong emphasis on soliciting and listening to the opinions of those served, i.e. of OVA members. What seems to me to be missing from their approach, however, is that “A servant leader shares power” and a servant leader should seek “to be servants first, to care for the needs of all others around them” (quotes from this Wikipedia article).
Sharing power
I believe that, in a democratic society such as ours, all authority ultimately comes from the electorate, which in Oakmont means the full body of OVA members who are eligible to vote in an OVA election. Furthermore, while we have a representative democracy, in which we elect directors to represent us once a year, this is not fully adequate to protect the legitimate interests of the electorate.
In particular, while state law assigns the authority and obligation for maintaining our physical facilities to the Board, it does not require that only the Board should make decisions about expanding our physical facilities, as is often claimed by more corporate-minded directors. In fact, not only does state law require membership votes for large dues increases and large special assessments, but beyond that, it recommends that Home Owner Association (HOA) Bylaws include a provision prohibiting “Incurring aggregate expenditures for capital improvements to the common area in any fiscal year in excess of 5% of the budgeted gross expenses of the Association for that fiscal year”, except with the consent of Association members by a direct vote.
Furthermore, Oakmont’s 2018-2019 Bylaws Revision Committee recommended amending the Bylaws such that: “A membership vote is required prior to Board approval of a Capital Improvement, the total cost of which is over 20% of the average of the Association’s audited, total operating expenses for the past three fiscal years.” See paragraph 12.1 of the BRC proposed Bylaws revision (p. 16). All of this means that there is ample precedent and law supporting the fact that it is reasonable for an HOA board to share power with the membership, particularly when the issue involves very large capital investments or changes to the nature of the HOA.
Having established that the law encourages, and in some cases requires, a sharing of power between an HOA board and its membership, there is one more thing to consider – do OVA members want to delegate such power to the Board, or would they prefer to make the biggest decisions by direct vote. To seek a preliminary answer to that question, I posed the following question as a poll on the Oakmont section of Nextdoor:
- Regardless of whether or not it is legal (it probably is), do you believe that it is ethical and democratic for the OVA Board to commit to expensive new construction projects without receiving OVA membership approval through a direct vote?
This poll garnered 214 votes (admittedly a very small percentage of Oakmont), as follows:
| 70% | Absolutely not. No large capital improvement project should be undertaken without a membership vote to approve it. |
| 13% | The results of the 2030 study constitute adequate membership approval, even though participants were never polled. |
| 18% | Yes. It is ethical and democratic for the Board to make such decisions without a membership vote. |
The sample size (214, out of over 4600 OVA members) is too small to claim statistical significance, but I think the question was posed fairly and I can’t think of a hypothetical reason why this small sample would differ from the population as a whole. To know, of course, the poll would have to be repeated in a way that reached all OVA members (e.g. by U.S. Mail), but I strongly believe that the answer would be the same – a large majority of OVA members want to be asked before the Board commits to an expensive new construction project.
Conclusions
- Unless a new full-membership survey asks OVA members about their activity levels, our best information is from the 2015 Voices of Oakmont survey, which reported that 1 / 3 of OVA residents were not very or not at all active.
- While this leaves 2 / 3, or around 3000 OVA members who are very or somewhat active, only about 20% of this number participated in the Oakmont 2030 activities, and even that small number were not polled to determine what percentage would support construction of new expensive facilities.
- Given this dearth of information about membership support for new construction, and the apparent unwillingness of the OVA Board to conduct full-membership surveys, referenda or votes, then if the process continues it will likely result in a long-term plan that includes major construction of new facilities that do not have the approval of the membership.
- This means that, although following some of the tenets of servant leadership, the Board will be ignoring their obligation to serve all OVA members. Furthermore, by consistently refusing to include the OVA membership in the biggest decisions, they will be extending the discord that has gripped Oakmont over the past several years.
What can you do?
Vote against anti-democratic Board candidates and vote in favor of the candidates who promote fiscal conservatism and membership empowerment. These candidates will practice true servant leadership, by including the OVA membership in the most expensive decisions facing OVA in coming years.
Specifically, I urge you to vote for Heidi Klyn, Matt Oliver and Jerry Gladstone, as opposed to Tom Kendrick, Iris Harrell and Jeff Neuman.
Thank you Bruce for your Excellent article and factual supported insight … importantly pertaining to “servant leadership” and other areas.
Great article. You explained it all so well. The facts speak for themselves. We must have an Oakmont that is Democratic, let the people who live here be heard, and allow them to make the decisions. How could it be any other way???
Steve Spanier ended his July 1, 2018 remarks with the following:
“The world is in desperate need of a different leadership model. We’ve seen the negative impact of self-serving leaders in every sector of society around the world. We need servant leadership disciples and we nominate you” ( ie: Oakmont members). I suppose we could substitute “Oakmont” for “The world”.
On a personal level:
Although it wasn’t easy, I tried (not always successfully) to follow the philosophy of a presenter (Stephen Covey) at a conference in 2005.
Covey was a speaker at a Wash DC financial conference for nonprofits and federal/state government managers along with several House and Senate Members. His management philosophy of “Trust & Inspire vs. Command & Control” provided some interesting insight into a different, although a somewhat scary, way of managing than the historical corporate format. Not everyone was supportive at first, but the majority of the attendees committed to try the format in some way. A follow up regional conference showed that Covey’s methods were valid and did in fact have a positive effect. Although integrating Covey’s philosophy into a nonprofit may have been easier than the “normal” private corporate organization, it did seem to benefit both the “trickle up” and “trickle down” communication efforts to create a more trusting atmosphere.
Oakmont leaders have a difficult task, trust can make the job more efficient, financially viable, and enjoyable for both the leaders and the membership.
The following quotes from Covey were my “take away” from that conference. e impactful on people, their work, and their performance, than trust.
“The simple, often overlooked fact is this: work gets done with and through people. There’s nothing more impactful on people, their work, and their performance, than trust”.
“Collaboration is the foundation of the standard of living we enjoy today. Trust is the glue.” Stephen Covey
John MacInnis – Oakmont
Bruce:
I applaud, second, and heartily endorse your article’s statement that, “in a democratic society such as ours, all authority ultimately comes from the electorate, which in Oakmont means the full body of OVA members who are eligible to vote in an OVA election..” Bravo. I wish that were true. And I would support all efforts to make it so, including changing the Bylaws, especially the Bylaw about how Bylaws can be changed.
That said, I strongly disagree with your conclusion that the Next Door poll you cited is factually meaningful. It’s valuable as opinion, but not at all valid as a true “poll.” While you say you “can’t think of a hypothetical reason why this small sample would differ from the population as a whole,” the real point it: There’s no legitimate reason to believe Next Door’s poll does represent Oakmont as a whole. Polling—accurate polling—is a mathematical and statistical science. The core (though hardly the sole) requirement is a random sampling of the group whose opinions you seek. The Next Door survey badly fails that basic test. First, it’s only asking for opinions of those Oakmont residents who choose to participate on Next Door, which means you’re “poll” was already limited to only seeking the opinions of a discrete, self-selected group, ie, Next Door participants. And while I’m new to the community (and love it!), even a cursory reading of Next Door posts and comments tells you its readers hardly represent a “random” sample of all of Oakmont. Second, the nature of these kinds of social media polls is that they also self-select for only the opinions of those who tend to answer social media type polls, another self-limiting factor which likewise destroys the statistical validity of the sample. I also have to say that your questions and answers, while not unfair, biased the results or the implications of the results by the way they were drafted.
All that said, however, my first point is the one I most embrace – that the electorate should work to assert and preserve its ultimate authority, delegating many decisions (of course) to its duly elected representatives, but choosing to retain other decisions solely for itself.
I won’t take issue with anything you said about the limitations of a Nextdoor poll, especially one that received responses amounting to less than 5% of OVA members. It certainly has no statistical validity, although it is my opinion that a full-Oakmont poll would have at least a majority answering “Absolutely not”. The only way to know for sure, of course, is to conduct a well-constructed full-Oakmont survey or poll. and, as pointed out in the article, that hasn’t been done since 2015. And there is no reason to expect a new, well-constructed survey unless the majority of the OVA Board changes.
On that, Bruce, we almost entirely agree. Lots of work to do on this front, for sure!
Bravo Bruce!