Ludmilla had to make me swear, double pinky, not to go to happy hour at The Front Page and show up at the Finance Committee meeting last night.
I have been trying to quit my appointment for several months now. There had been a coup de main on the panel, orchestrated by Joy, the spouse of the Realtor who made a tidy living selling units here at bib Pink, and he was on a continuing crusade to attempt to lower the size of the condo monthly fees.
A little background may help. Big Pink is an old school building, constructed in 1965 as a first Continental-style high-rise apartment building in the Buckingham neighborhood of Arlington. The erection, if I may say so, lasted until 1981 when the building went Condo and the new owners took over the management of the place under the Condo Board.
Several committees were formed at the time, many of which had important functions in managing The Rules. The Covenants Committee was more than a bit like the Big Pink Committee on Un-American Activities, and set the standards for which we are known. Our own Finance Committee was established to make recommendations to the Board on the annual budget and the priorities that go with them.
We pre-date the County Master Plan, the one that restricted high-rise structures to the immediate couple of blocks on either side of the Metro’s Orange and Silver lines. There will not be another building like ours while the County and the Master Plan exists.
Mostly we watch the Condo fees go up, and the number of standing committees dwindled steadily. The Board really isn’t interested in hearing from us, since we are a pain in the butt, almost in a league with going to happy hour at the Front Page and then rolling into a good rack-and-stack financial meeting with a good head of steam to argue about priorities.
The condo fees are really a significant part of the ownership problem, and the impact on sales is what made Joy’s husband so emotional, since the numbers were enough to queer many a sale when people saw what was lumped onto the monthly payment for the privilege of living here.
Don’t get me wrong- I have been in the building 15 years now, and lived in five different units, owning two of them. Not at the moment though, since State Department Sue won’t sell me the one I am living in now. I figured I was on the way out, anyway, and generally speaking, renters are second-class citizens at Big Pink. Technically, I should not have been appointment to panel, since I am a transient, but Ludmilla needed an ally in her struggle with the forces of darkness.
Anyway, this time of year we had a Revised Reserve Study to address, along with the first draft of the proposed 2017 Budget. The politics of the thing was unknown territory, since Joy and her Husband abruptly sold their unit and moved out, vacating the Chairmanship so Ludmilla could sweep back in to that august position. We now have two new members of the Committee, both of whom have their own ideas on how to economize, and who will have to be broken on the back of years of bad ideas we have already tried.
The last big attempt was to outsource our employees. We have several, from the Community Manager through his deputy, four or five concierges to man the front desk, and a team of five engineers to do the real work of shoveling snow, collecting the recycling, vacuuming and mopping stuff up.
Most of our staff is Hispanic, and have been here for years. The idea of turning over the friendly faces to a new crew of lowest-competitive-big laborers in constant turn-over was a horrifying prospect, but the press is always on to try to keep the dreaded condo fees down. People are generally the most expensive thing in the budget, so the matter required constant vigilance.
I thought once Joy was off the property, the need for my support to the forces of Good would be minimized and I could slink off into the night. Ludmilla really wanted me there, just in case, and this was a full production number in the East Party room, one of two penthouse gathering places.
In attendance was Ludmilla, of course, Peggy from the Management company (we already outsourced the really hard stuff), and the Community Manager who does the day-to-day management of the building and staff. The President of the Board was on hand to observe, an act of self-sacrifice that is profound. Who on earth would sit through one of these meetings without a compelling interest in being there?
And then there were the five of us on the actual committee, though I am a little unclear on how many of us there really are, since I have announced my retirement at no less than four previous meetings. I was pleased I did not have a full happy hour under my belt- I had actually read the read-ahead package, decided in my professional judgment that it was a clean budget, there were no magical tricks to pull out of the reams of numbers in their neat columns. I remember nearly getting into fisticuffs with the Creole Professor over them at one of the Annual Meetings when they served alcohol, a feature that was dropped in the interest of saving money and avoiding intra-board fistfights.
Basically, my position was that everything looked good, there were no low-hanging fruit to pluck, and that we should bite the bullet and fully fund the reserve. The downstream impact was something to consider, though. The Building has a nominal useful life expectancy of a half century, at least according to the Reserve Study, and we are already past that on a lot of long-lead time items. You know, new pumps and pipes and roof; tennis court re-paving. The big pool project. Milling and paving the parking lot. I had noticed a lot of stuff was all coming together in the 2020 budget, and I made a mental note not to be here when it all happens.
So, the real subtext to it all was how much to tuck away into the financial reserve. We discussed that with the Treasurer, a real accountant who volunteers to take the abuse of his numbers with ours. Good guy- and we argued over the difference of about one percent in the reserve contribution for an hour and forty-five excruciating minutes.
The smaller the stakes, the more emotional these things get, and the Treasurer finally said that he would present our recommendation to the Board, though he was going to argue for his numbers anyway.
With that, we all looked at each other and decided the meeting was over, and dinner and a drink or two was in the cards. I limped out of the room with the others, down the three gray cement staircases to the eighth floor- one of the few on which I have not lived- and to the elevator and back down to ground level where I keep the vodka.
It may have been my last meeting. I think, on the whole, I would rather be at The Front Page. But it is always refreshing to spend time with people who are doing something out of the goodness of their hearts.
And for lower Condo fees, of course.
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com