HSVPOA BOD Meeting Audience Comments 1/15/20

What follows are the comments from the audience at the last HSVPOA Board Meeting, which was held on January 15, 2020. The commenters were Cheryl Dowden; 2020 BOD Candidate Lloyd Sherman; 2020 BOD Candidate Kirk Denger and Robert Busse. At the bottom of this article, there is a link to the YouTube video.

Cheryl Dowden

Cheryl Dowden: “First of all, I am representing my husband because he is hearing impaired and it is not easy for him to speak in front of people because of his disability.”

Cheryl speaking for Joe: “He would like to know, Madam Chair, why on the Governance Committee section online there are no minutes, no dates for scheduled meetings, why there is no information online.”

Cheryl speaking for Joe: “Is everything discussed there secret and couldn’t general minutes be posted and meeting dates?”

Erickson: “Certainly the meeting dates can. I don’t know, Ella [Scotty] how you get that information to post on the website. I am not sure operationally exactly how that happens. We’ll look into that and if we are deficient, we’ll fix it.”

Dowden: “Thank you, Cindi.”

Podawiltz: “But as such, that Governance Committee is a Board committee. So it’s really not open. Is it?”

Erickson: “Any of the topics that are discussed in the Governance Committee meeting are confidential in nature and so the Charter reserves the right to hold the meetings as closed sessions. That is true.”

Dowden: Then I proceeded to ask about the posting of the Marketing Presentation.

Erickson: “The presentation was video’d. I don’t that the document, itself, has been made generally available.”

Nalley: “So which document are you referring to?”

Nalley stated the Marketing Plan was attached to October 19, 2019 Board Packet. Members are welcome to come in and inspect anything they haven’t seen.

Dowden: “Thank you for that answer and I guess I just missed it.”

Dowden: “I agree with Buddy. He is not going to believe this. But not many people attend committee meetings. In an ideal world, this would happen. I would like to encourage folks to attend these meetings.”

Dowden: “But, we don’t live in an ideal world.

The three-minute timer went off and they wanted me to stop, but agreed to let me quickly finish after I stated that part of my time was taken by others.

Erickson: “We did engage in dialogue here that we shouldn’t have done. So I am going allow, just wrap up real quickly.”

Dowden: “It is very quick.”

Dowden: “Okay. But the reality is that many can’t [attend meetings] due to deafness, age, travel, lack of transportation, illness, etc.”

Dowden: “And in the case of my husband, even if he attends he can’t really hear a lot of it. So I would also like to encourage staff to record meetings and put them online. And I am not only asking staff to please record them, but also to close caption the meetings for the hearing impaired. Why can’t we bring the meetings to the people? Thank you.”

Lloyd Sherman

Lloyd Sherman: “Because these topics were discussed today, I don’t expect any answers back. This is just food for thought and I realize that some of this is related to staff responsibility. But there are also strategic items that need to be considered.”

Sherman: The first one is the course closures as it relates to the restaurants. I know that there was a methodology behind why we wanted to do that. And I typically concurred with it, personally. However, I am not sure that closing two restaurants a day, not closing them, but closing the courses and impacting two restaurants a day was a good choice. I am aware of one restaurant which I frequent occasionally, often actually, that has indicated that they don’t know that they’re going to make it through February.”

Sherman: “Now, if we want the POA restaurants to survive and we think that that can go to private entities, the closure of one of these restaurants of a private entity, is not going to help. That’s relative to the course closures and mostly to the restaurants.”

Sherman: “The other thing that I believe has an impact on our rooftops, that I hear in the real estate industry, from builders, is that the fees that we are charging them for permits is going to have a negative impact on rooftops and I believe that there should be some more discussion on that. I don’t know what the answer is, but I would think the builders would. That’s all I have to say today. So I yield my time back.”

Kirk Denger

Kirk Denger talks about marketing. “Yeah, it just occurred to me. It occurred to me that Explore the Village [POA website] could be connected with DeSoto, since he was an explorer. And I don’t know if that’s where you got ‘explorer’ from or not, but I just thought that, you know, it’s part of our heritage and could possibly be connected there.”

Robert Busse

Robert Busse also talks about marketing. “Way back when Mr. Twiggs was running the show, he, I think was pretty much on his own, decided to change our logo. At the time, I thought it was a mistake and throughout the years, it was a mistake.”

Busse: “I would like to get word to the new marketing folks that I think that our logo needs to be changed. Our present logo, to me, is very outdated, very bland and does absolutely nothing for anybody when you look at it. So if we could possibly take a look…”

Erickson: “Address the Board please, address the Chair, please.”

Busse: “Okay. How’s that?”

Erickson: “That’s fine.”

Busse: “We need to get something more modern, aggressive and what have you. Thank you.”

The meeting adjourned at approximately 11:45 a.m.

Click here to hear Kirk talk about his platform last year

Click here to hear Lloyd talk about the CMP

Link to YouTube video of the audience discussion

By Cheryl Dowden, January 26, 2020

Photography and video by Joe Dowden