There is no need to rush the Northstar lease purchase other that the fear that the newly elected Board will demand a fair, unbiased comparison between it and other potential options.

At this time I am totally against moving ahead with the Northstar proposal for the following reasons.

First, the ‘Deep Dive’ audit indicated that OP has three very basic serious issues that need to be addressed….

-Antiquated and fragmented software

-Weak business processes

-Poor management

I have personally asked four sitting Directors if they have validated and verified that the business process and management issues have been rectified. Director Herrick said he did not know. At the town hall meeting Director Supik did not answer the question. Director Parks said he would check with the GM. Director Maroney said that verification and validation would come from the audit of this year’s financial statements.

Implementing a software package before correcting the business process and management deficiencies would, in my opinion, put the entire software investment at risk. The responses from the four sitting Directors do not give me the confidence I would require to risk nearly one million of our assessment dollars.

Second, the Northstar proposal addresses only one of several software and IT related issues.

The Northstar software package is designed for club amenity management. I have no doubt that it would serve our golf, aquatics, racquet sports and Food & Beverage amenities well.

However, Northstar does not address any of our ‘municipal functions’ such as asset management, road, bridge, bulkhead & ditch maintenance management, preventive and predictive maintenance of buildings and equipment, capital planning and CPI activities. It also fails to address our budgeting, forecasting, reporting and project activity requirements.

The question that really needs to be answered is what the plan to address all of these areas is and what is the cost? Are we looking at extensively customizing Northstar? Leasing a second package to cover the ‘municipal’ functions? If we are looking at two packages what is the plan to integrate them to improve our budgeting, forecasting, reporting and project activity tracking? To run this software will our IT Department be “in house” or outsourced?

Third, why not look at other options to determine if they are viable and cost effective?

When all of the software issues are addressed and the total cost of implementation determined why not issue a RFP covering all of the above to determine if any HOA management companies are capable of fulfilling these tasks with their management software and interested in doing so? Only then could the Board make a fair, unbiased comparison based on cost and implementation time to determine the best option for OP.

The Board is responsible  for considering any and all options to provide the best, fastest, and highest value solution to our financial management issues.

To do this the Board will need to insist on a plan that covers all of our software requirements and the costs for implementation and ongoing IT operations. Once completed the Board can instruct the GM to issue a RFP for outsourcing that provides an ‘apples to apples’ comparison.

To me, doing anything less would be reckless and totally unacceptable.