By Tom Blakeman, October 22, 2021
Hot Springs Village POA appears to have some major issues with Capital Allocation, particularly Leasing. Has the ‘free spending’ of the last five or six years put us behind the eight ball, so to speak? Why has POA been leasing capital assets? What can be done about it going forward? Could this be one of the reasons certain past Board Members wanted the Corporate Treasurer and Controller to be a nonstaff Property Owner? Has the Village been fooling itself with the “Property Owners’ Equity” storyline? There are a lot of issues here. FRATF should make it a priority to figure it all out and the Board of Directors should resolve it ‐ BEFORE any endorsement for collecting more property owner assessments of any kind. A serious, in-depth, hands-on, Total Investigation is required. And, this does not mean asking the current CPA firm or General Manager (all hired hands) to simply justify the status quo. The CPA firm and GM or Staff are not responsible for running the business properly. The Board of Directors are!
So, has this been done? Doesn’t appear to be. But yet they are “selling” us on more assessments anyway. VOTE NO!
BTW, if anyone wants more details on this problem see my comments to the Board and FRATF dated 04/14/2021. [Click here to view that report.]
Tom Blakeman
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Gene Garner
10/23/2021 — 9:28 am
Leasing has become an easy way to shift responsibility and accountability. Our experience with Troon proved that a third party couldn’t make Village golf courses and their restaurants profitable. Most Property Owners don’t know how much we paid them for the privilege but it wasn’t cheap and the results are negligible.
Presently the restaurants are being leased out and I see a lot of complaints on NextDoor about the service and operating hours. I don’t know how profitable they are.
Our gates have been leased to another contractor and I fail to see any improvement in security or traffic control. This is another expensive experiment but we do have those flexible lane markers that makes the West Gate look like an obstacle course.
The previous regime leased our Protective Covenants to an outside group and we got the CMP an unbelievable collection of dos & don’ts that cost us $500,000 –and are now just a failed memory.
We now have the “one arm trash trucks” lease and we still don’t know if they will have to make two trips on each street or we will have to move our new trash containers across the street for pickup. If this new system doesn’t work, who do we complain to?
Tom’s right, leasing is costing us big bucks and I don’t see an end in sight. It makes me wonder if we lease all responsibility to a professional Property Management Company would we need any staff or Board of Directors?—Gene
Tom Blakeman
10/23/2021 — 12:44 pm
Thanks Gene. The leasing of golf carts is another huge problem with a bill coming due shortly to re-up.
Lloyd Sherman
10/23/2021 — 2:04 pm
Don’t forget the golf carts Gene. Not sure whose idea it was originally to start this shift, but I think the golf carts, along with the CMP came under the administration of Ms. Nalley.
Jama Lopez
10/26/2021 — 1:46 pm
Yes, it happened under our CEO. What I saw was cash coming in for older golf carts and regular payments going out for new golf carts. So, no large outlay of cash; we had new carts; and cash came in for the old carts. Problem becomes what we face now, renew lease, purchase leased carts or make a large capital purchase for new carts? It was a bit shortsighted but the cash flowed last year.
Susan Posner
10/24/2021 — 3:02 pm
Leasing with or without option to buy? Garbage trucks renter ends up paying the leasers purchase of them, end of lease the leaser will sell the trucks for profit. So basically you are covering the leasers cost of the fleet. They make the profit off of renters, if you lease with an option to buy you are now reducing cost of buying new if so desired. This would be true of garbage truck or golf cart. Lots of luck with side loading trucks, garbage cans being on one side only of street, wait till neighbors fight over that so hope this isn’t the case. Guard booths are of no significant value anymore since anyone actually can get pass into here since 2018. Lane markers should have been “road turtles”(reflective disks on pavement) only at the entering merging areas. Low “speed cushion”(not high parking lot divider like was used before) placed a few of them on the entering side can reduce speed of cars while allowing emergency vehicles to straddle. If only residents would yield to the left lane and no resident should be so rude that they try to out run a visitor at guard booth. Slow down, it’s not a racing horse gate. Residential with many side roads. https://trafficlogix.com/speed-cushions/
Susan Posner
10/24/2021 — 9:54 pm
You can’t have commercial within and be gated nor private