Monday Morning Quarterback (definition): a person who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event. It would be easy to accuse me and the things i have written as little more than M.M. Quarterbacking. Hell, anyone can say what should have been done after the fact. However, in this case, i am dealing with what happened in real time and with real events as they unfolded. (2012-2014). With that explanation out of the way, do you have the capacity for intellectual honesty? I know, that is a loaded question because it forces you to be brutally honest with yourself and the answers you give. It's those kinds of careful self-examination that keeps us grounded in reality. Posted the other day on a Facebook group i participate on, this well written, well thought out commentary was shared. The Sun City Advocates Jean Totten took a whack at responding from a current perspective. I elected not to engage, as i find Facebook too limiting in having a meaningful dialogue. I am not posting the authors name, but i have re-posted her full comments here. They are concise and clear, but lack the context from a historical perspective and why that matters. Here they are, italicized: "While I agree that You are due more than an email of declination, and I would get it if it were me by properly contacting a member of the Board (relentlessly), I would assure you that I am paying attention to what's going on in the community. Let me see ... new facilities, e.g., Grand Avenue Rec Center. Maintenance regularly done at other Rec Centers, keeping them wonderfully usable and nice to look at. Rec Dues continued to be kept low by any standard for such a community. Our low property taxes, due to the overlay, continue to be protected. Plenty of opportunities to volunteer. The Sun City Pride is out and about. Opinions abound, pro and con, on just about any subject in the community - and put out there in more ways than can be counted. Property values have skyrocketed. Houses are continuing to getting rehabbed or updated. A diversity of churches to be involved in. Plethora of clubs and hobbies to enjoy. Entertainment possibilities, including the current Sun Bowl concerts. Is it all perfect - NO. But, than neither am I or anyone else for that matter. Count this 2nd plus generation person (family here since the 1960s) thankful for what we have." She covered a lot of ground, but let's separate some of the non RCSC stuff out first. * The age overlay and low property taxes. That is SCHOA's domain and they do a good job with it. The history of how we got there may surprise many of you. It was not the Webb Corporation that did it, the residents did. DEVCO sold homes to those age appropriate, but there was nothing in the early documents protecting it. That didn't happen until 1983 when the federal and state law allowed it to be added. In fact, the Sun City Home Owners saw it as too much work and an aggressive group of home owners started collecting signatures on their own. SCHOA realized the owners were serious and became involved and the age requirement of 55 was added to the deed restrictions and to the CC&R's (History matters). * Plenty of opportunities to volunteer. Another well made point, but little to do with the RCSC. In fact, it was the recently departed general manager who opted for the new tag line, "Sun City, the original fun city." Losing our identity as a city of volunteers was wrong in so many ways and kudos to some board members at SCHOA for helping restore it. All of the other organizations in Sun City have kept the city of volunteers concept alive. Proving, Sun City is a sum total of its parts and not just the RCSC. Property values have skyrocketed. They have, as they have everywhere in the country. It is a more a function of what is going on with low interest rates and people re-evaluating their lives. Now, to the main thrust of her arguments and we agree, Sun City is a great place to live. There's countless reasons for it, the clubs, the events, the entertainment, how well kept the amenities are, and yes, the low cost of the yearly fees (unless of course you are single person living here and you are subsidizing married couples). There's so much to appreciate and enjoy about the Sun City way of life. It is in fact why we (the Sun City Advocates) are involved. I'll break it off here, letting just how much we all love what we have percolate...because the next segment is where we will ask you to be intellectually honest with us. Can you be? We'll see.
The poster of this piece has a built in advantage; she is second generation and she has had family here since the 60's. She knows Sun City's successes were due to the amount of time, money and effort John Meeker and the Del E Webb Corporation (DEVCO) put into making it work. She also knows, those moving here (the pioneers) took ownership, accountability, responsibility and building a sense of community to heart. I would and have argued our current success is more attributable to their efforts than anything done more recently. But, that's not really the point. Where this falls apart is when we look at how the community was created and what has been done over the past 15 years; especially to our documents. And to be clear, it's not just what the by-laws say, or don't say, it was the decision to give so much authority to the management team and divert it away from the membership. Even John Meeker, the genius he was, wanted the members input and more importantly, he respected them and listened to what they wanted. She mentioned as her shining example, the new Grand Ave Center. But, is it? As a stand alone on a busy highway, i am sure the handful of clubs that got space there are happy to have it. I could run through previous board members who had relationships to some of those clubs getting space, but it isn't important to the discussion. Maybe it's just a coincidence. Nope, what i want to know is how much the final cost to buy the land, do the site preparation and then building them cost? See, the problem is, that information isn't posted anywhere...or if it is, please show me. Just saying, that kind of information should be readily available and posted. It's not. What's the difference you ask? Good question/better answer. In 2012/2013, the Lakes Club came up for sale. 38,000 square feet situated beautifully on the shore of View Point lake. Gorgeous setting and of massive historic significance. DEVCO used the private club to close the sale of homes in Sun City till the day they left. It had bars and restaurants and meeting rooms and was elegance personified. In later years it housed the Theater Works theater group when their building was lost to a fire. It would have provided the space we needed in the coming years and freed up all of the Lakeview Rec Center as the administration would have easily been housed in the Lakes Club. It was the best of all worlds. The drawback was the land under the building was owned by the Sun Health Foundation. The building was for sale with a lengthy land lease. There were allegedly preliminary discussions concerning a trade off with them for office space in the building. The purchase of the Lakes Club would have solved countless issues the RCSC would be facing in the coming years. It was a win/win/win. Unfortunately, by the time i was elected to the board the general manager and the board made up of a majority of golfers had decided the PIF should be dedicated to golf. The long range planning committee, before it was dissolved, were told they only could look at making recommendations for 25% of the long range plan. The other 75% was to be dedicated to golf course renovations. Several of us toured the Lakes Club and i was literally salivating over the possibilities. It would mean pushing back the golf course renovations. By then the boards had made commitments to numerous upgrades to golf courses. The general manager had made golf her priority and the board of primarily golfers wanted to be loyal to her wishes. It was a challenging and frustrating time for Carole Martinez and i, as we simply got out voted. We didn't argue we should buy it, we argued the community and the membership should have the ability to make that choice. It was how Sun City was built and why is was so successful. Suffice to say, it never got off the ground, never got a hearing in front of the community. It was at that exact moment in time i understood the wants and needs of the community just didn't matter. The general manager and the board knew what was the right thing for us. But, did they? It's easy to sit here today, not knowing the history, and tell us how great everything is. Just ask yourself, where would be today if we had put the question to the community. Owning a piece of history, opening up 30,00 plus square feet of space to clubs and moving the administration to a single location which by the way, contained space for a theater...would we be better off than what we are facing today with the Mountainview project? The downside would have been the Willowbrook/Willowcreek 10 plus million dollar renovations the PGA expert told us weren't needed for another 5 to 7 years would have been pushed back to the time he recommended (2024). Had the community pushed for a community center, we would have had one centrally located gathering space. Sadly, we'll never know because a group of golfers elected to the board and led by a general manager didn't trust the membership to make the right decision. That is simply put, tragic. By The Way, the cost to buy and renovate the Lakes Club, building and grounds would have been far less than the PIF funds spent on the Grand Ave project (and i say that without knowing the exact dollars they spent there). The projections to buy and remodel the Lakes Club were on the high side at 7 to 8 million dollars. Hopefully some day they will show us what the Grand Ave project cost.
So i am perfectly clear, the Lakes Club is lost and probably forever. What should never be lost is the idea those living here having a say when it comes to big ticket items. Maybe they would have loved buying it, maybe hated the idea. Either way they had the right to have a voice rather than the general manager and a handful of golfers who were on the board making the decision to spend so much money on golf. In the coming weeks and months, you will see just how much that was. Thank God they voted in the member/board exchanges, maybe now we can get to the truth.
Over the years, the question was often asked; what do you love about Sun City? The answers are varied and extensive: From the clubs they have joined, to the churches they attend, to the events they take in, to the cleanliness of the community, to the serenity and quiet that comes from living with a bunch of seniors; the list is near on endless. It was never intended to be a one size fits all. In fact, the entire concept was built around the idea the owners would decide what Sun City should become. That is in my humble opinion, why Sun City was so successful. It is also what set us apart from a thousand other age restricted communities. Unique is the word i use, and other than Sun City West, our humble beginnings were shrouded in a cloak of ownership. A community where those moving here were accountable and responsible for our success. The myriad of things to do were awesome, even better was the need to take an active part in volunteering. This is hanging on one of the panels ( i know, i wrote it) in the Jane Freeman room at the Del Webb Sun Cities Museum. The story tells of a young writer for the New Yorker who came to live in the community in early 1964. Calvin Trillin was 30 years old and stayed with us for nearly two weeks. The near on 30 page article was glowing, until the very end. He summarized his experience with the belief Sun City wouldn't work. He believed those moving here would grow weary of such a hedonistic lifestyle. Seniors having nothing to do but play their remaining years away would become disappointed with no real meaning to their lives. He may have been right but for the fact, their lives here weren't just about playing golf or hanging by the pools. Nope, not even close. They embraced the ever so simple concept of giving back in even greater numbers of hours than they did chasing leisure activities. As Sun City grew in size, it expanded the needs to participate in the building of a community where volunteering was a way of life. Lots of reasons; it kept costs down, it helped seniors feel there was a purpose to their lives, it was as much about socializing with those living here as it was about the value it created. Most of all though, it built a sense of community. It helped shift their loyalty and love of where they came from to a community they had just moved to. Imagine, you spend 50 or 60 years in one place, you grow to love it and then you are displaced. What better way to feel welcomed and and an active participant than by donating 10, 20 or more hours per month to help shape the dynamic of Sun City. It was like building a house with thousands of volunteers. The foundation was predicated on those living here making sure it would work, stand the test of time. For the past 20 years, before we were legally able to live here, i have been writing these things. I knew Sun City was special, unique and my biggest fear was we would lose that concept, those tenets that ran through the core of the community. My worst nightmare came true when i watched as the general manager began dismantling the things i loved about Sun City. I was so frustrated by her actions, i ran for the RCSC board in an effort to stop it. By the time i got there (2012), the paradigm shift was in place. The golfers on the board were an easy sell with visions of millions and millions of dollars being invested in the game they loved. In what is best described as a quid pro quo arrangement, absolute control was granted the gm with the payback being less hours being spent on running the community. Where the board used to make decisions, now the management team gave them the answers and their job was loyalty to organization which ultimately became loyalty to the general manager. To make it all work, several things happened. The one we know about was changing the corporate documents. Changing the Articles of Incorporation took a community action, changing the by-laws was a board action. Doing so was way easier with 2o or 30 members in the room and a board who believed anything the general manager wrote must be a good thing for the community. With every change, the community's voice became less and less. Interesting in they are stilling working to quiet us. But wait, there's more and in my next post we'll explore an interesting comment made by the Sun City Home Owners President in SCHOA's latest newsletter. It is quite fascinating.
Eric Hoagland is the President of SCHOA and he wrote and insightful article on the front page of their March newsletter and finished on page 4. When i got it in an email blast, i was stunned reading his comments. I won't reprint it in its entirety, but here is the first paragraph which will help set the stage for my thoughts: "Interestingly, a low-level-controversy has been taking place in Sun City over a period of time. To date, thankfully, no blood has been spilled although depending on the resident, some have strong feelings about the motto of Sun City. Should it be, “City of Volunteers” or “The Original Fun City”? Recently the topic came up when the“PRIDES” arranged for new highway signs to replace the old ones. Plans are for the new signs to read, “City of Volunteers” replacing the slogan, “The Original Fun City." The first thing that surprised me was the actions were attributed to the PRIDES. I know Lloyd Maple, a long time SCHOA board member and one hell of a hard worker has been aggressively working on these signs for at least the last 4 years. Lloyd was instrumental in painting Sun City's walls via the SCHOA Foundation. He and a couple of other board members not only raised money to get it done, but also grabbed paint buckets, brushes and rollers to insure it got done. I know because he asked me to try and secure approval from PULTE to authorize the starburst logo when the signs were to be put up by the County. They had told him they wouldn't do it without PULTE's approval. I did find an old DEVCO employee who suggested he not waste time locally, but to go directly to their Atlanta corporate offices. It must have worked, which was a no-brainer given they no longer use the starburst. I know i was elated when i heard they had the go ahead. The City Of Volunteers was our identity that set us apart from the rest of the age restricted marketplace. We lost it when the now departed general manager worked with a marketing company to come up with a new slogan: Sun City; The Original Fun City. We were told she had to do this because PULTE wouldn't okay the use of logo on merchandise sold in our pro shops. One had nothing to do with the other, but it was her reason for dumping City of Volunteers. When i read Eric's comments i was shocked; who could possibly hate returning to the City of Volunteers? Then it dawned on me, their new general manager was a former RCSC board member and board president. He is the same guy that wrote in the Sun Views his editorial that also ran in the Independent Newspaper something akin to the header; Why Do We Even Need An Annual Membership Meeting?" I guess now it makes sense, all comes together. His loyalty still lies with the now departed gm and i know for a fact she resented there was an effort to restore the old label. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say, when the change was coming, the RCSC removed from the electronic billboards the flashing reference to the "City of Volunteers" and replaced it with Sun City, The Original Fun City. Sorry, i pay attention and noticed, but can anyone say "PETTY?" Anyway, his commentary returns us to the long standing battle over who is in charge? Functioning volunteer boards invariably find themselves in arguments with the paid staff. The paid staff likes to think they are the boss, community documents for not-for-profit organizations most often put the power squarely in control of the volunteer board. I don't know the dynamics for sure, but my best guess is Lloyd's push for this change resulted in the hired help at the highest level being unhappy. Who the hell else would care about returning to our roots as the City of Volunteers? Don't even get me started about what is going on at SCHOA. I not only served on their board for 3 years when we rebuilt it (2006-2008), but i also served on the committee to review the CC&R's and the effort to update them. The entire reason the new gm was hired was to help pass them and now they have been kicked to the curb. When asked about them, the most often heard response is, "no comment." It is also disappointing to see the newsletter and newcomers meetings to be used for political propaganda. I get it, our relationship with Clint Hickman is critical, after that, i just see it as cronyism. The point here is this: The RCSC recently departed gm wanted badly to change the identity of Sun City. Her goal of identifying us as Sun City, The Original Fun City, was a dramatic departure from how we were built and why we were successful. Losing that identity changed how people saw Sun City. Returning to it was awesome. Now, if and when our by-laws are rewritten perhaps we can begin to restore the voice of the community as well.
Well, based on some of the comments on other websites by Members who applied for the Ad Hoc Committee but were not selected, doesn't give me any warm fuzzy feelings that anything will change. Many of those posters had quite extensive credentials very much appropriate for that committee and cause. Some were not even interviewed? This is going to be a very interesting endeavor and I hope many Members show-up at those meetings. It won't take long to determine which direction the committee is heading in or if it will simply be another waste of time with recommendations that the board will not approve. I wonder if they'll allow any guest comments or will they be simply shut us down? The motion that created the committee didn't come with any option other than making the mandatory report back to the board! If they think they're going to hold ZOOM meetings over the Summer months when perhaps some snow-bird committee members are out of town, they need to make that permissible with either "a standing rule of the parent body or organization, by the motion establishing the particular committee, or by instructions included in the motion referring an individual matter to the committee or issued subsequent to such a motion (see 13:8(d), 13:22) (RONR 9:35) Third Reading Ad Hoc Committee Motion by Director Collins – I move to form an Ad-hoc committee to review & revise the RCSC Bylaws. Seconded by Secretary Lenefsky, motion passes final reading unanimously with President Lehrer abstained. There's only two-ways it can go but if the current board is still in power when this committee makes its final report,...you can guess what the results will be!
