Fabulous eh? Since Sun City's inception, residents have found the community to be a blessing. Most move here without understanding just how good it's going to be. Within months they find there is more to do than they could ever imagine and quickly start sorting through what appeals to them. It's that damn good. But this thread is from a different perspective. It's about the Preservation and Improvement Fund (PIF). For the past 5 years we have been averaging about 6.4 million dollars per year. Truly nice numbers because as our community ages, our need to revitalize and reinvent ourselves continues to grow. And for the uniformed, that works out to 2100+ home sales or property transfers per year. And to extend that, that averages out to better than 6 home sales in Sun City each and every day of the year. Staggering. In another thread, i stated 2016 was the best year of dollars collected ever in our PIF. Yesterday we heard in the general managers report we had 7.4 million dollars year to date collected in PIF. With December yet due, we will close out the year with very near 8 million dollars. In fairness, part of it is due to the new KHov development as they are paying both the recently increased $3500 PIF and and an access fee as a buy-in to the rec centers (total paid this year is still way less than a million dollars for the year). The point here is, we are having the best year in our history since the inception of PIF (1999). Yet, with the board motions passed yesterday, we also are witnessing one of the largest yearly increases ever in our monthly fees. Of course the lament is to blame Prop 206, but realistically, there need be a closer look at how and why this happened...beyond what AZ voters did at the ballot box. Stay tuned, more to come as we examine what went wrong along the way.
Great segue E into the bigger picture discussion on PIF and Sun City's future. But before we go there, let's take a quick look back. Even before that, this brief commentary is in order: Early in 2000 i started playing on message boards like this. One of the contributors said they were essential, because it was the one medium where we could tell our story without filters or constraints. She was spot on. Organizations hate boards like this, they lose the control they have of what the story is. For example, if you look back in the RCSC minutes, you'll find no mention of the fact there was a decision made to carve out the PIF dollars that were to be allocated to golf (75% of the PIF budget going forward). It wasn't an accident we began dumping money into golf courses, it was a premeditated action by management and the board. Gary Brawley was hired to do complete course redesigns on at least three courses. They knew if all of this was put in front of the long range planning committee it would be a hard sell. The makeup of LRP was not predominantly golfers and explaining why that much money should go to golf would be an impossible task. Fast forward to today and we see the problem magnified 5 fold. Every golf course maintenance shop now is inline for a rebuild (by the time we are done, 8 million plus more dollars). The board is moaning we need to do turf reductions because we need to save water. I know it sounds good and is a valid point, but at what cost? If each course runs us 800K, it just adds on to the ever growing total. And when you consider the North course, Riverview and Willowbrook/Willowcreek will have cost us 25 million, those dollars collectively are staggering. Then we've got the new pro shop at South (another 2 million dollars). That doesn't include all of the irrigation we've done and course renovations that were smaller in scope (at least 4 other significant changes in the past 6 or 7 years). The point being, we've now allocated somewhere between 40-50 million dollars over a 10 year period. Pretty sizable numbers for a sport struggling to survive and has around 15% of the population that plays. With that said, i've never been anti-golf. This is a golfing community and always will be. We need to keep them playable, we need good irrigation, wells and water distribution. We need good maintenance, that's not a PIF matter, but a general ledger expense. So as i sit here typing, as we review how we got to the place we are at today, perhaps you better understand my frustration (and anger) at decisions by previous boards and management. Their actions have left us at the mercy of a handful making choices that may not be in our best interest. While i was talking to the general manager after the meeting the other day, Brian Duthu, director of golf walked up. I like Brian and think he does good job. When i asked Jan when is it too much to have spent on golf, 40 or 50 million dollars, Brian said by the time we are done, golf will be good for the next 50 years. While it's a solid answer, the bigger question is; what will the state of golf be in 50 years from now? All which brings me back to the idea we absolutely need a long range planning committee. It should never have been done away with and as we watch expenditures mount, it should be clear to everyone why this was such a catastrophic mistake. In the end, it's not just that we shoveled bushel baskets of money into golf, but that we ignored the rest of the community by doing so. Mountainview is just one example, there's others. Common sense would tell us we could have balanced out golf rebuilds in a more equitable way simply by having a long range plan with dollar allocations worked to the bigger picture improvement of the community. For now, we are stuck with golf still getting the lions share of the PIF moneys and the rest of the community being tossed the scraps. Sad.
Just found the Sec Treasurer's report given at the January meeting on December collections and there was more than 6ooK collected which means we brought in over 8 million dollars in 2016. I repeat, best year ever. Nice.
