I am saying that someone in OPA, Inc. or on behalf of the board should do due diligence reviews and apply modern capital management analysis of the "economics" of various proposed projects presented by consultants.

I will refer you and other readers to page 16 of the document titled COMMUNITY FACILITY EVALUATION prepared by Design Atlantic, Ltd. dated 8/1/04. On that page alone, the alternative discussed is understated by $2,000,000 due to an error in addition. The error is carried over to the executive summary on page 5. Just do the math! Casual reading picked this up. I did not go through and recheck all the numbers. As they say, "it's not my job". Someone in OPA should and they should at least review the supporting details and the assumptions behind them for reasonableness.

It does not matter if OPA is a non-profit organization. It does not matter if the community hall is not an income-producing asset. I am questioning the capital management policies and procedures used in OPA, Inc. to decide among suggested alternatives. Non-profit organizations use modern capital management techniques. It just good business sense when organizations are spending other folks money (yours and mine).

If there is a $2,000,000 understatement on page 16, how many other errors are there in the report or the details supporting the report? How can our board or OPA, Inc. have faith in any of the proposed costs if there is no assurance that the project cost estimates are reasonable? There may be similar errors in the boat slip data.

If the people in this community VOTE to build a new community hall, or a new indoor pool, or a new gymnasium they are not going to be concerned about any of the issues you raise.

I bet you property owners would be upset if they find out that critical errors were made in projected costs after they have chosen the alternative and construction has started. What if the board has to say oops, this project will now cost $2,000,000 because we gave you bad numbers!

When I hear that OPA, Inc. has not had to confront the problem of major expenditures for infrastructure replacements in 35 years, I question if they know how to manage major capital expenditures. When I have not seen one single  "budget" versus "actual" report on current capital expenditures, I wonder how they control replacement costs. When I see a $2,000,000 understatement on two pages of a critical document being used for decision-making I question if any due diligence review is being done within OPA. When I hear our board uses payback figures erroneously calculated with gross receipts only to justify a controversial proposal I question if property owners are being fed solid numbers on any major project out there now.

I admit that I may have gone off the deep end in some of my discussions on capital management. However, the fact the you nor most your readers may not understand the details of managing capital expenditures does not make my questions or suggestions irrelevant. To the contrary, if OPA is about to embark on major capital expenditures for the first time, then property owners should expect that OPA can manage those costs as well as they manage operating and maintenance costs. Now there is a scary thought.