A Continuum of Fraud

This article was sent in by an Eastman resident reader and should serve as a cautionary tale to other Homeowner Associations:                            

The mostly unspoken yet systematic method of voting for amenity improvements for "all" Eastman residents has finally reached its highest degree of fraudulent transparency.  At our recent voting for a new Center, it was embarrassingly obvious that the voting body was heavily weighted with golfers.

It is a hard-to-deny secret that golfers populate our Boards, Committees and volunteer groups far in excess of their 22% actual Eastman population.  This came to be by various devious plans, which resulted in golf members of some Special Places being elected to vote for their Special Places. These golf centric members create a majority that votes into life major golf-oriented issues for all of us.  Issues like the $4.7 million dollar golf country club that a large majority of us do not want.

Requests to have these golf-centric owners out their allegiances to golf go unheeded.  And because of that, their voting numbers continue to outweigh the voting numbers of the remaining 80% of us. It is this fraudulent system that enabled a minority of our neighbors to burden us with an enormously expensive new Center, which is truly just a deluxe clubhouse for golfers. It gets voted in for all of us to shoulder the cost by a 20 percent minority of our golfing Eastman neighbors. This is a far less than honest situation. If the 87 voters who voted on September 15 were only 20% golfers, that would give Eastman a voting body of 17 to 16 golfers, and about 70 non golfers. Since the vote for the new country club won by only two votes, how might it have come out with a voting body correctly allocated to golfers and non-golfers?

This is how our "old" Center, younger than most of our homes, gets voted to be destroyed, even though it more than serves its original purposes and can be maintained into the foreseeable future for minimal costs.

And this is how the golf barons capture enough non-golfing serfs to pay for their excesses. Strong language? Yes it is.  And there will be more to come.

It will not come from those 20% of us who see Eastman as little more than a cheap way to play golf at the expense of their hapless neighbors. It will come from the 80% of us who see it as a wonderful outdoors recreation village, designed and built for all of us to enjoy its beauty, splendor, waters, forests and wildlife.  An 80 percent with no interest in golf at all.

We know that a too-large percentage of Eastman's landscape is constantly groomed mowed, watered, fed and maintained by many men and many machines. But we have not recognized the sting of the cost for such an "amenity" like we will now as the new golf clubhouse takes shape.

That sting has been here longer than most of us knew. By various less than transparent machinations of budgets, golf's manpower assignments and costs, machinery costs and capital improvement projects -- the many costs of the golf amenity -- get conveniently lost and buried in our general budgets. And we have been paying them for years -- all to the benefit of the golf barons. This year, for example, almost $1000 of our annual ECA fees is the cost of golf and the Center in Eastman. (See http://eastmanblog.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-five-point-assessment-cost-reduction.html)

Any such arrangement of voting powers outside of a small HOA would soon see the long arm of government come in and change it. In American industry it is called racketeering. In Eastman, it is paraded as a bogus definition of democracy at work.

These are old and new complaints, but what we need is a recipe to change it. Our foremost goal is to be certain that membership on any board, or committee have no more than 20% golfers.  Again: no more than 20 percent of any Board, Committee of voluntary group may be golfers.

And to govern that, a simple list of all Eastman golfers be made available to all of us (this is a closely guarded list, but does exist now), and then the proposed new rule stated above could be rigidly enforced.

This will immediately change Eastman, as we now know it. Various methods of paying for golf will need to be decided by golfers. These might include:

abandoning the golf course. This would be a bonanza for many of us who now pay such high HOA fees. We could get a real estate expert to carve the course into premium lots for premium homes, (some lots even having their own putting greens!).  The proceeds could go into our long-term reserve fund and the excess distributed to all present ECA dues payers. Those of us who have paid the $5,000 fee just to buy into Eastman could perhaps get that money back!  And think of what this would do to our real estate values, ECA dues, and lifestyle here in Eastman if golf was removed from our expense budget and a few dozen premium homes were added to our tax base. One last benefit might be a host of walking paths and trails that are now reserved for golfer's fairways.

Perhaps some other entity will buy the golf course, but we would be able to draw up the contract in a manner that made it an entertainment entity for golfers, paid for by golfers and with considerable financial protections from any negative aspects this might create for the non-golfing remainder of us.

I am certain there are more creative solutions than I can come up with presently, but first let us get the system that created this costly penalty to non-golfers fixed.. I leave it to the legal minds to bring this smarmy situation to an equitable, fair, democratic conclusion.

Submitted by Jim