OUCH! I'm not ready to give up on the best turkey sandwich on the Eastern Shore,but your point is well taken. I could take fewer trips to Arbys.

I know your upset with my stance on trash collection, so let me express it in another way.

Once upon a time there was a king[O.P. Board of directors],who needed money[Assessment fee hikes],to pay for his wars[trash collection],in Europe. He decided to raise it by imposing a tax on tea[make everyone pay for trash service wheather they wanted to or not]. The citizenry[home owners of O.P.]rose up and boarded the kings ship. Pretending to be indians[acting against those who were acting for the over all good of the community],and dumped the tea into the habor thereby expressing their desire not to be taxed without representation[the right to choose for themselves]. Shouting LIBERTY! LIBERTY!! LIBERTY!!! Having been down this road before with other rulers acts of unfairness[paying for water service at some set rate wheather they used that quanity of water or not]. They would not not go quietly into the night[even if trash collection reached a breakeven point with dump your own].

Many people for various reasons can not take trash to the dump on their own. Trash collection must be provided,and I am in favor of twice a week as opposed to once a week for this service[because it smells]. Maybe I'm too trusting an individual to believe that there are so many residents sharing their trash with their neighbors as to make it impossible for the trash company to make a profit. It just rubs me the wrong way to create a monopoly situation for any business. Didn't the Fed. Govt. step in to bust them up a while ago? I don't want to see any kind of a humpty dumpty monopoly put back together again.

Joe I value your thoughts even if I disagree with you. As of yet I do not fully understand all the issues confronting the community,and value your words and ability to lay out issues explicitly. Could you please help me understand the two major funding/budget issues you are talking about that nobody has addressed?

It is my objective to stop next years assessment fee increase dead in its tracks[however not to roll back future assessment fee hikes for reasons I'll state later]. I want to take a good hard look at the Historical Reserve Fund[which I believe you are calling the big ticket reserve fund]. This H.R.F. in my opinion is used as a slush fund to pay for everything. It was used to pay off the pool,and the golf course, and evidently will be used to pay off the yacht club in advance of, and in place of the Capital Expenditure Fund which was created to pay off the yacht club in 2017. Accounts need specific names for use. A slush fund is unexceptable.

I believe there is more than 10 million in the in the H.R.F. with about 6.5 million spoken for which will pay off the yacht club. That leaves about 3.5 million that is in excess of needs. Originally I favored giving part of this amount back to the homeowners, but I have recently taken a look at section 3 flooding. I see that bulkheads of stone or wood may have to line the ditches running from the pond to Beauchamp road. The ditches need to go down at least another three feet in depth[but this can't be done because the water table starts three inches down]. Pipes need to be two or three times there current diameter to handle water flow. Roads will have to be dug up to lay the new pipe. Big proplem and still the million dollar question is; what will happen at Beauchamp road? Will the county or state step up and widen the pipes that run across this road? Can the county or state declare eminent domain and lay bigger pipes under the golf course for water to get to the Martin River[bigger proplem will the state allow all this fresh water  to run into this brackish environment, probably not. Even if the answer is yes, what about our pond? The water does not drain into it,but out of it. Ditches fill up quickly because of pond runoff interfering with rain fall drainage. Will we need to build a dam with a sluice gate at the pond and ditch intersection, or a dam all the way around the pond or lower its water level three feet? Will we have to fill this pond in to negate the drainage situation[BIG BIG proplem, the pond is a safety value, anything you do to it might back water up to our golf course causing even more flooding]. To resolve this issue it is going to take big bucks so I am now reluctant to give back excess funds in the H.R.F. or role back assessment fees beyond next year until I have a better feel for just what can be done and how costly this is going to be to rectify.

I want to get the county commissioner in on this even though it's not the counties,but our problem. We need an engineering prospective on this issue. Even if we build a walk in pipe system from River Run to Beauchamp road will the state allow it and ignor environmental regs? Where are we in resolving this conundrum, I don't know, it's going to take better minds than mine to resolve this issue. What I do know is that we live on a sandbar, average elevation eight feet. We have paved our driveways,built sheds,and garages all taking away the grounds ability to absorb water. What do we do now?

I'm hoping everything I've mention won't have to happen all at once, or even be needed, but I will sleep better knowing we already have some money in the H.R.F. to at least get started toward fixing this problem. The biggest questions of all is will all this work fix the problem? Have I missed an alternative solution to the problem? Contrary to other opinions it is not a debris causing problem. It's a water volume problem,but cleaning may be the only solution we have. If this problem can be resolved with the 3.5 million in the H.R.F. then I'm in favor of a future rollback in assessment fees beyond next year. I am not in favor of doing cosmetic fixs like this Board and general manager have done in the past three years! BUT,could they have done something to fix it other than just to clean it, I don't know.

Joe in the future please don't put words in my mouth, it's hard to get them out with my foot being in the way.

Roland D Langevin