Opinion: a Board Attack on an Owner

In the February 23 board meeting, board president Ray Aguirre made an attack on Social Committee chair Ruth Markovitz that I believe was unjustified on every possible level.

You can listen to the first five minutes of the incident here:

And you can consult the audio recording and AI-generated transcript of the entire meeting to hear how it all played out.

I believe:

• Ray’s accusations were false from the start.
  • Ruth was in Pedro Park signing people up to work on joint park events with the social committee from The Pointe.
  • From the day I first started getting involved with the Social Committee, Ruth’s hope has been that its events could help bring people in the building together, and no one has been more saddened by the fact that a certain circle of owners never shows up at them.
  • She has, for example, invited the McLeans to participate in an art-based Story Hour, in the hope that their participation could help break the ice. (I’ve also invited them to share their art in the City Walk Talk gallery.)
• Even if Ruth had been actively campaigning in the park or at any other time for Ray’s removal, that would not justify his response.
  • There’s nothing wrong with working to remove (or elect) someone you believe should not (or should) be on the board. (It’s been done before. 🙂)
  • Elected leadership should not use their power to attack one of their constituents just because the person is opposed to them. (We’re seeing way too much of this on the national level as it is.)
  • No City Walk board member should ever talk to an owner in the tone Ray used to Ruth and to others in the past. Even if attendees speak angrily or disrespectfully at meetings, the elected leadership has a far greater obligation to conduct themselves in a civil manner. Incendiary confrontations can often be avoided if just one side will refuse to stoke the flames, and it’s far easier for the five board members to get together and commit to a united front of civility than to control the behavior of 200 individual owners.
  • Ray has diffused potential blowups before by shifting to a peacemaking role. I’ve seen him do it on multiple occasions and have praised him publicly for it. I call upon him to follow the “better angels of [his] nature” more often.
• The worse thing that could happen to this community is the formation of two Social Committees where the supporters of each refuse to attend the events of the other.
  • To be clear: I have no problem with multiple committees planning different events. The more the merrier. But the potential for segregation, for a further division into two camps where members of each camp refuse to attend the events put on by the other, concerns me greatly.
  • If we do end up with multiple parties planning different events, I hope that owners and residents will attend the events that interest them, regardless of who planned them, rather than boycott a given committee’s events. This is one way we can begin to bridge the divide.

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