bod + mismangement + finances = bingo

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "in defense of everything !!!":

You must be new owner or you would have received the mailing about what CCLA was requesting as the rights of property owners to have acess to. There never was a lawsuit against the Association but after years of requesting info. and the boards over the past 20 years running the community like their own little kingdom and refusing to ALLOW property owners, without having to sign 5 documents plus getting a notary to verify their signature then maybe the bod would allow you to see whatever you requested. They even asked the Attorney General to step in who informed them that the only way to force the issue was to hire a private attorney & get the courts to intervene to force them by PA. law "A right to know state" to let anyone look over the books. Enough people in the community felt that the only way to do this was to raise money to hire a lawyer which at least a third of property owners felt it was important enough to put up their money to try & get answers. Their intention has never been to sue for money, which would only be suing themselves, but since the board refused to provide answers were hoping that the courts would side with owners and & rule that they have a right to know if their money is being spent correctly or is being mismanaged. If it has cost $9,000 as Mr. Berkey states it is because they are fighting against your rights and the new lawyer they have hired is charging outrageously high fees as I have heard that CCLA has not spent even half that amount for their lawyer. Why is the President & some board members fighting so hard against CCLA what are they trying to hide? A manager gets fired after 5 years, not because he was doing a great job but because there were problems with his management, don't you think owners have a right to know if he mismanaged our funds that he had the right to sign for loans, and exhorbitant contracts and to accept bids. With so many other associations the last few years proving that money is stolen from their accounts & people going to jail that we are not entitled to the proof that our money has not also been misappropriated? Sure Mr. Berkey this summer stated that if you want to review anything he will now allow it after you request it in writing and get approval. But this is after CCLA had to hire a lawyer, but says if they want to have an accountant check the finances then they should pay the fee. Why? the responsibility is the Boards not members of the community to prove that the PM did the right thing under our employment

bod + mismanagement + finances = bingo

Anonymous to me
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "in defense of everything !!!":

IN ANSWER TO WHAT A WONDERFUL JOB THE TREASURER, ED ROHS DID THIS YEAR WITH THE BUDGET THAT EVERYTHING IS LISTED, YOU ARE RIGHT, BUT NO THANKS TO HIM BUT TO THE FACT THAT FINALLY AFTER ALL THE YEARS OF THE SAME PEOPLE ON THE BUDGET COMMITTEE WHO 90% HAD NO BACKGROUND IN FINANCE A NEW COMMITTEE WAS FINALLY FORMED WITH ACTUAL OWNERS WHO HAD BACKGROUNDS IN FINANCE, BUDGET PREPARTION & THE FACT THAT THE NEW BOARD VOTED THAT THERE SHOULD BE MORE ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE COMMUNITY. PLUS THE FACT THAT MEMBERS OF CCLA HAVE REQUESTED TIME & TIME AGAIN FOR AN ACCOUNTING OF VARIOUS FUNCTIONS IN THE COMMUNITY THAT WERE NEVER BROKEN DOWN BEFORE AS TO COST & RETURN. SO MUCH INFO ON THIS YEAR'S BUDGET IS MANY THANKS TO THE NEW MEMBERS WHO MADE SURE THEY GOT ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS THAT THE COMMUNITY NEEDED TO KNOW.
ALSO THANKS TO THOSE CCLA MEMBERS ON THE BUDGET COMMITTEE WHO ALSO WORKED HARD TO GET YOU THE INFO.

PAUL KRUGMAN

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Climate of Change


By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 27, 2009
Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.

The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.

For this budget allocates $634 billion over the next decade for health reform. That’s not enough to pay for universal coverage, but it’s an impressive start. And Mr. Obama plans to pay for health reform, not just with higher taxes on the affluent, but by putting a halt to the creeping privatization of Medicare, eliminating overpayments to insurance companies.

On another front, it’s also heartening to see that the budget projects $645 billion in revenues from the sale of emission allowances. After years of denial and delay by its predecessor, the Obama administration is signaling that it’s ready to take on climate change.

And these new priorities are laid out in a document whose clarity and plausibility seem almost incredible to those of us who grew accustomed to reading Bush-era budgets, which insulted our intelligence on every page. This is budgeting we can believe in.

Many will ask whether Mr. Obama can actually pull off the deficit reduction he promises. Can he actually reduce the red ink from $1.75 trillion this year to less than a third as much in 2013? Yes, he can.

Right now the deficit is huge thanks to temporary factors (at least we hope they’re temporary): a severe economic slump is depressing revenues and large sums have to be allocated both to fiscal stimulus and to financial rescues.

But if and when the crisis passes, the budget picture should improve dramatically. Bear in mind that from 2005 to 2007, that is, in the three years before the crisis, the federal deficit averaged only $243 billion a year. Now, during those years, revenues were inflated, to some degree, by the housing bubble. But it’s also true that we were spending more than $100 billion a year in Iraq.

So if Mr. Obama gets us out of Iraq (without bogging us down in an equally expensive Afghan quagmire) and manages to engineer a solid economic recovery — two big ifs, to be sure — getting the deficit down to around $500 billion by 2013 shouldn’t be at all difficult.

But won’t the deficit be swollen by interest on the debt run-up over the next few years? Not as much as you might think. Interest rates on long-term government debt are less than 4 percent, so even a trillion dollars of additional debt adds less than $40 billion a year to future deficits. And those interest costs are fully reflected in the budget documents.

So we have good priorities and plausible projections. What’s not to like about this budget? Basically, the long run outlook remains worrying.

According to the Obama administration’s budget projections, the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P., a widely used measure of the government’s financial position, will soar over the next few years, then more or less stabilize. But this stability will be achieved at a debt-to-G.D.P. ratio of around 60 percent. That wouldn’t be an extremely high debt level by international standards, but it would be the deepest in debt America has been since the years immediately following World War II. And it would leave us with considerably reduced room for maneuver if another crisis comes along.

Furthermore, the Obama budget only tells us about the next 10 years. That’s an improvement on Bush-era budgets, which looked only 5 years ahead. But America’s really big fiscal problems lurk over that budget horizon: sooner or later we’re going to have to come to grips with the forces driving up long-run spending — above all, the ever-rising cost of health care.

And even if fundamental health care reform brings costs under control, I at least find it hard to see how the federal government can meet its long-term obligations without some tax increases on the middle class. Whatever politicians may say now, there’s probably a value-added tax in our future.
But I don’t blame Mr. Obama for leaving some big questions unanswered in this budget.

There’s only so much long-run thinking the political system can handle in the midst of a severe crisis; he has probably taken on all he can, for now. And this budget looks very, very good.

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