(Feb. 25, 2016) When the Ocean Pines Association Board of Directors voted 6-1 last Friday to trim the legacy reserves collection in order to provide a zero increase in assessments, Bill Cordwell was the lone ‘no’ vote.
In a statement provided to the Gazette, Cordwell offers some background on his decision.
“Unfortunately, this so called ‘compromise’ is typical Ocean Pines, and we keep doing stuff like this to ourselves. Oh yeah, we will be heroes for not raising assessments, but let’s look at reality.
We just paid a lot of money for a reserves study, which shows our reserves are in the less-than-poor category. We are supposed to have $14 million dollars in reserves, and we have less than $4 million. So, now we just cut some more out of the reserves. If we do everything we talked about doing, we will not have any reserves and will be $5 million in debt. We have done things like this over the years to artificially keep the assessments lower, which is the reason for us being short now.
As a retiree, I would much rather pay $20 now than get hit with a big increase in the future. This whole thing started with efforts to reduce the so-called ‘five year plan.’ I keep hearing that same myth, from the usual suspects, that this fund was supposed to go away after five years. BULL. It was supposed to be increased a little at a time for five years, but was supposed to be used for the ‘major projects’ that we have facing us: the yacht club, bridges, Beach Club, police station and country club.
After all the ‘major projects’ are completed, then this fund can be done away with and assessments lowered. But, if we do away with this fund now, then we don’t have money to repair or replace our major amenities, which is exactly what these people want.
Other communities and associations raise these funds by doing a large special assessment, but we don’t. The justification I heard at the meeting the other day was that we shouldn’t collect it until we have something that needs to be done. First off, everything I named previously needed to be done years ago! But, we are also doing things now like repairing the bridges, and we should be doing something with the police station, Beach Club – not just the bathrooms – and the country club.
These projects should have all been done years ago, and at probably a third of the cost today. So, if we just started collecting now for these projects, it would be years before we could do even the cheapest of them.
To put it in personal terms, if your car breaks down tomorrow and you are living check to check, like many of us, and you haven’t saved money for things like this, how long will you have to walk until you can save enough money to get it fixed? But, of course, if we don’t have the money and we use the wait until we need to do something before we collect it [approach], then we will hear the same screechy voices say, ‘oh, no we can’t do that because we don’t have the money.’
It’s the old chicken before the egg trick used by those that have been on the board for many years and have used this trick to do nothing and let our community deteriorate. That’s why we have rotting buildings with employees falling through floors. For a community this size, our buildings are a disgrace.
And then they will blame a lack of maintenance. More garbage. We have and continue to spend a ton of money on maintenance – so much so that we probably could have replaced each building by now. You can only put so much paint over rot!
Our police station, in my opinion, needs to be addressed, but we are having a major push to renovate the Beach Club bathrooms, because one director will use this to get re-elected. It’s a little funny I didn’t hear a word about doing these last year.
I am all for doing something with the Beach Club and its bathrooms, but if we put that ahead of our employees, then our priorities are really screwed up!”
In a statement provided to the Gazette, Cordwell offers some background on his decision.
“Unfortunately, this so called ‘compromise’ is typical Ocean Pines, and we keep doing stuff like this to ourselves. Oh yeah, we will be heroes for not raising assessments, but let’s look at reality.
We just paid a lot of money for a reserves study, which shows our reserves are in the less-than-poor category. We are supposed to have $14 million dollars in reserves, and we have less than $4 million. So, now we just cut some more out of the reserves. If we do everything we talked about doing, we will not have any reserves and will be $5 million in debt. We have done things like this over the years to artificially keep the assessments lower, which is the reason for us being short now.
As a retiree, I would much rather pay $20 now than get hit with a big increase in the future. This whole thing started with efforts to reduce the so-called ‘five year plan.’ I keep hearing that same myth, from the usual suspects, that this fund was supposed to go away after five years. BULL. It was supposed to be increased a little at a time for five years, but was supposed to be used for the ‘major projects’ that we have facing us: the yacht club, bridges, Beach Club, police station and country club.
After all the ‘major projects’ are completed, then this fund can be done away with and assessments lowered. But, if we do away with this fund now, then we don’t have money to repair or replace our major amenities, which is exactly what these people want.
Other communities and associations raise these funds by doing a large special assessment, but we don’t. The justification I heard at the meeting the other day was that we shouldn’t collect it until we have something that needs to be done. First off, everything I named previously needed to be done years ago! But, we are also doing things now like repairing the bridges, and we should be doing something with the police station, Beach Club – not just the bathrooms – and the country club.
These projects should have all been done years ago, and at probably a third of the cost today. So, if we just started collecting now for these projects, it would be years before we could do even the cheapest of them.
To put it in personal terms, if your car breaks down tomorrow and you are living check to check, like many of us, and you haven’t saved money for things like this, how long will you have to walk until you can save enough money to get it fixed? But, of course, if we don’t have the money and we use the wait until we need to do something before we collect it [approach], then we will hear the same screechy voices say, ‘oh, no we can’t do that because we don’t have the money.’
It’s the old chicken before the egg trick used by those that have been on the board for many years and have used this trick to do nothing and let our community deteriorate. That’s why we have rotting buildings with employees falling through floors. For a community this size, our buildings are a disgrace.
And then they will blame a lack of maintenance. More garbage. We have and continue to spend a ton of money on maintenance – so much so that we probably could have replaced each building by now. You can only put so much paint over rot!
Our police station, in my opinion, needs to be addressed, but we are having a major push to renovate the Beach Club bathrooms, because one director will use this to get re-elected. It’s a little funny I didn’t hear a word about doing these last year.
I am all for doing something with the Beach Club and its bathrooms, but if we put that ahead of our employees, then our priorities are really screwed up!”