Anyway, with regard to your premise of OPA hiring a management firm to handle day-to-day operations, I would have no objection if the board decided to explore that idea. In fact, OPA is already doing that in golf, where an outside manager is hired and all the golf employees work for the management company.

Tom Olson, the gentleman who preceded Bob Thompson as OPA General Manager, is, I understand, working as manager of a HOA in Delaware but as an employee of a management company in charge of the overall HOA management.

I believe the current board, or pretty much any board in the past, would say that your description of how OPA should operate is actually how it does operate..... board makes policy and GM/staff carry out that policy in the day to day operation.

Overall, I'd say that is more or less the way things have worked for the 26 or so years I've lived here fulltime. This political wrangling between the board and the GM only began with the hiring of Bob Thompson in my opinion.

Hiring of an outside management firm would not eliminate an OPA Board of Directors, nor would it eliminate the human propensity for those board members to involve themselves, to one extent or another, in the day-to-day operations.

Our Board of Directors, like any means of governance including the government of the United States, is never going to be perfect but I have yet to see a better alternative proposed.

Finally, I hope you will continue to participate on the forum. Truth is, we probably have a great deal in common when it comes to how we look at politics in OPA....... and make no mistake, this place is as political as Washington.