At the Nov 17 board meeting, the board voted to accept the final revision of the 2025 Reserve Study. I’m thrilled about this, and I’m grateful to the board for finally accepting it, as well as for their words of support for its importance, but I’ve also been very frustrated by the year-and-a-half-long struggle to get to this point.
Early 2024
I first learned about the Reserve Fund deficit in early 2024, from Tony Harmelink, the former board member who discovered it, and I begin trying to speak with various board members about it. Some were willing to talk, but two members in particular (Bob McLean and Ray Aguirre) continually put me off, until finally, I was informed by Barb McLean that they were unwilling to speak with me because they saw me as an ally of Tony, whom they saw as a political enemy. (The root of that was another long story that many know, that I might post about here in the future.)
Mid 2024
I joined the Engineering and Reserve Committee and we began work on this document explaining to owners what the Reserve Fund was and why it had gotten so low. When we asked the board if it could be sent to all the owners, they never responded to our request. We later learned from board member David Radcliffe that they had indeed voted non-publicly on the question, but had simply ghosted us as their way of saying no.
Late 2024
The board persistently refused to fund a new Reserve Study, usually giving the reason that there was no money allocated for it in the 2024 budget, though at one point, Ray called the idea that we needed to consult with outside experts on such matters “laughable,” and at other times has emphasized how the study is just a recommendation and we don’t have to follow it (which is true, but his statements came totally out of the blue and I wasn’t aware that anybody was suggesting anything different.)
Finally, two owners paid for it out of their own pockets.
More Delay
We met with Building Reserves, the company we commissioned to create the study, and then they produced a first draft of the study, which we had to opportunity to request two rounds of revisions for. This was in May of 2025. The months from then to today were spent trying to get the board to meet about what revisions, if any, we would request, and to review the revisions that were done.
I’ll illustrate the pain of that process with an account of the homestretch, after the second round of revisions were finally delivered in early September.
- After a couple of weeks of no response from the board to my request to meet, I asked Ray about it at the end of the September board meeting and he expressed total willingness, but then I never heard from him about it again.
- A couple of weeks later, I knocked on his door to ask him about it, and he told me to just set up a date, preferably on a Thursday.
- So I did but it turned out it didn’t work for Bob.
- During the October board meeting, which Bob couldn’t make, I asked Ray if, after the meeting, he and I could come up with some possible dates that he could then run by Bob, but he said he’d talk with Bob himself and they’d get back to me.
- They never did.
Which brought us to the November meeting, which Ray couldn’t make it to, when the subject of the study came up and I Bob said the study seemed okay to him and I asked if they could vote on it then and there and they did.
Which was great, and again, I want to say that I’m grateful to the entire board for finally getting this done, but the whole process has left me with some concerns.
- The delay itself, which is not ideal, of course, but it’s even more disturbing given the precedent of the current board majority saying No to the release of the Reserve Fund explainer by simply never responding. When you don’t hear back from them in a long time, you wonder, “Are they just busy, or have they already decided No and are intending never to respond? Are they basically just ‘running out the clock’ on me?”
- I’m not sure to this moment whether the board really believes in the importance of the Reserve Study. Their actions as listed above suggest they don’t. However:
- Both Bob and Ray have also talked about the value of the Reserve Study on other occasions.
- The 2024 board, on which they were two of the five members, did increase the Reserve Fund transfer in the 2025 budget by an amount roughly equal to what the new Reserve Study says it needs to go up by in 2026 as well.
- They did finally vote to accept the study.
How, then to resolve the apparent contradiction? I’m “hoping” (in a strange way) that all of their apparent past opposition to the reserve study was purely political, because it was being pushed by Tony and then by me. Of course, this only leads to my final concern:
- The tendency of certain board members to treat some owners as The Enemy, and to demonize them and exclude them from participation.
I’m hoping that the acceptance of the 2025 study is a sign that all of these concerns will lessen in 2026. Here are some possible signs of it that we can look for:
- Will they make the new study (and the Engineering and Reserve Committee’s analysis of our failure to follow the recommendations of the 2014 study) available to all the owners?
- Will they set the 2026 Reserve Fund transfers to the amounts recommended by the new study? (They’re meeting over the budget as I write this, so we might learn the answer to this one soon. Once we do, I’ll update this post with the news.)
Meanwhile, you can find the 2025 Reserve Study here.