As published in The View, October 2021:
President
Change of Seasons as the World Turns
By the time you read this in our October View Magazine, summer in our beautiful community will have passed, at least on the calendar but hopefully on the thermometer as well. Cooler days and nights will be the norm. Our neighbors will be back from their vacations, and our snowbirds will be starting to return. With the holiday season not far off, and “High Season” on the horizon once again, all the activities which make SCSH such a special place should be back and booming.
Fortunately for all of us, the world keeps turning; and your fellow volunteer homeowners who serve as Directors of your Board and staff the many advisory committees have kept working to preserve, protect, maintain, and improve our place in the sun. This all brings me to what I would like to focus on and get all our homeowners to begin to think about. We have many volunteers and important committees that help to keep our HOA dues from rising by working alongside the Board. But most of us are not aware that our Bylaws only provide for three very important “standing committees.”
Article 10 of the Bylaws provides for the Architectural Review Committee – now referred to as the Design Review Committee or DRC for short – which interprets and enforces the requirements of our governing documents respecting the appearance and beauty of our homes and lots. There is also the Covenants Committee that acts as “a jury of your peers’” to assist the Board in the enforcement of other rules and regulations which, in effect, comprise our community’s Municipal Code. Finally, there is a committee which we only see and hear about for a few months each year from October to the time of our Annual Meeting and Election of Directors each April. This is the Nominating Committee, which has the very important task of encouraging homeowners to step forward and run for the open Director positions plus to ensure that our elections are transparent, informative, and free and fair in accordance with the provisions of our Governing Documents and HOA law.
The Nominating Committee currently has the following members: Dan McFarlane, Pete Anderson, Robert Israel, Carolyn Collins, and Linda Strongin Grant. You will be hearing more from this Committee in the weeks and months just ahead. Their duties are specifically set out in Bylaws Section 7.4, but one of those duties is to make “reasonable efforts to recruit at least two (2) candidates for each position on the Board that is to be filled by vote of the Members.” There will be three Director seats to be filled by the three candidates receiving the most votes of homeowners. In accordance with the Governing Documents, because more than two positions will be filled, cumulative voting will be in effect.
Because some of our past Director elections have been uncontested, the Committee will be making efforts to encourage interested candidates to throw their hats in the ring, so to speak. Hopefully, there will be at least six homeowners stepping forward to run. By the way, no Member of the Nominating Committee may be nominated as a candidate for the election to the Board (Section 7.4.3).
If you have an interest in serving your HOA in the important position of Director, or if you know a fellow homeowner whom you would encourage to do so and support, please reach out to them and to the committee or any of its members about your interest, suggested nomination, or questions. The deadline for submitting Nomination Forms – at the time of writing this – has not been set but will likely be before Thanksgiving 2021 because it must be at least four months before the Annual Meeting on April 5, 2022.
So, my fellow homeowners, it is not too early to begin thinking about who you want to see leading our community, setting the tone, and making the important decisions on our Board of Directors.
Contact the author at john.macdonnell@scshca.com.