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Next Annual meeting April 20, 2013 at 1:00pm in the Grandmasters Ballroom.
Annual Meeting Minutes
2012 Meeting Minutes Pending
Scroll down to see previous years minutes:
Owner’s Association Meeting
April 16, 2011
1:00pm
Andrew Farah: I would like to call this meeting to order, it is Saturday April 16, 2011. We do have a quoram so this meeting is official. My name is Andrew Farah and I am your owners’ association president. To my right is your elected board members; Richard Glomski, Vicky Anderson(appointed), Ann Bonneville(appointed) and David Patoka could not be with us today. To my left is Joe Jacobson and John Holzschuh.
I want to welcome everyone today. I hope everyone who attended the welcome reception had a good time. Couple of things I would like to bring to your attention I have been president of this association for two years now and I have promised to bring value to your ownership. One thing I would like to talk about is the website. If you don’t get the website we have limited the foxtail to once per year mailed so we hope you will find a way to get on the website. Anything about dues increases or renovations will be on this website. I don’t know if anyone knows that we have started a 3-4 phase renovations project. We will have a unit available for you to take a look at from 3-4 today. As a result of that assessment we all got we were able to pay off all the bills and now use that money to renovate the units. We will spend over 1 million dollars in order to renovate 88 units. In case I forgot to mention questions and answers will be at the end of the meeting. 27 units will be done in this phase and then 27 in the next phase. Please don’t call and request a renovated unit. We are giving first preference to RCI inbounds to get those RCI scores up, bare with us and let us get more of the units upgraded first. Don’t call me and tell me you didn’t get an upgraded unit. We need to raise those scores and if you do get an RCI comment card be nice and give us good ratings. This gives you trading value and gives value to your unit.
We just started with a resale company called Compass. Joe will give us a report later. If your unit is of no value to you any longer you will be able to get on the list for resale but you have to be fully up-to-date on your dues. There is a list of rules that will need to be followed. It is in your hand out packet.
New this year we will also hold an election for officers after this meeting. We won’t be around very long after this meeting but each year after this meeting we will go downstairs and hold this election meeting. We will come back after that meeting and we will try to answer some questions.
We have worked real hard to prepare some agendas going forward so people don’t have to be afraid to get on the board. As long as you are an owner you can participate on this board. Owners hold 3 positions on this board and two are appointed. You don’t have to have an accounting degree. You can get more involved.
Financial Report:
Dues-no increase since 2003! We did vote on an assessment this year but in your packet is a list I put together which we will use as guidelines on what should increase the dues. Dues won’t have to increase because of the renovations. We will go through every year and check off the list and if those expenses increase by more than 10% then we will need to increase your dues. These are things we can’t control. As you can see 2009 and 2010 is past and the total for 2010 was less that 2009. We won’t and believe at this point we will try not to raise dues until the year after an increase if it is only 10% but if the number goes up by 15% then the dues may increase before the annual meeting. We may not be notifying you ahead of time but we will try to inform you when we can ahead of the increase. At least you know we are trying to put guidelines in place.
Profit and Loss
Joe Jacobson: financial Statement
The handwritten numbers will correspond to notes on following pages. They, as a board, decided not to raise the dues but decided to pay off some bills which I thought was a very good decision. The special assessment was to pay off real estate taxes which were out there since the Likas days. This allowed us to spend the $41,000.00 to use toward renovations. The association now makes money so we would be facing paying taxes come tax time if we didn’t spend the money. With board approval, we started spending this money so the association didn’t have so much money to pay taxes on. That is why if you go to the bottom line…we have gotten many of these areas down like payroll, etc. In Nov. and Dec we spent $90,000.00 we spent this early so we didn’t have to pay taxes. We started renovations early. We feel we can get this renovation done and unless something goes totally crazy beyond our control dues shouldn’t have to go up. I thought it was very forward looking of the board to pay off the taxes and not raise the dues because once you raise them it doesn’t go away. Two buildings are totally done and the rest will be done by June.
Go a few pages beyond 2011 Capital project. 7 buildings are on there with another ¾ building that had to be done because of water pipes. Anything such as furniture and appliances that is better will be moved to other units that aren’t getting renovated yet. Not everything, like carpet, won’t get replaced if it is still good. We put canned lights and track lighting, new art, painted, flat screens in the livingrooms, etc.
This fall as soon as busy season is over will start the next 7 buildings. Next year will be villas 1-8. We will do Villa 20 and Golf Villas in the following year. The plan is to get it done in 3 years and unless something comes up totally out of our control this will be done.
We had an e-mail from an owner upset about securing affiliation with II. We did this because of the owners requesting it. He felt we would be hurting his trading power with RCI by joining II. Don’t know if the person is here today but rest assured that this won’t affect your trading power.
We have Matt Murphy here from RCI who is going to do a presentation today.
Matt Murphy: Hello, one thing I want to say while I am setting up is that you are all very lucky that there hasn’t been a dues increase in so many years. That is a real cudos to your board. I go to a lot of these meetings and that isn’t common. A lot of owners tend to get feedback to the resort by using the RCI comment card and while it does get back to the resort you should tell the resort but make the comments favorable to RCI because this does affect your trading power. Both Jill and I will be available after the meeting for questions. We are a timeshare exchange company we help timeshare owners get somewhere else. For the weeks program you deposit your week here and exchange it for somewhere else. The enhancement we made in weeks is to make it more transparent as to what your trading power is. What is trading power. Simply put is value of your week against other weeks in RCI. Trading power is two fold one is when you deposit, depositing early increases trading power and that doesn’t change. The other is the supply and demand of other resorts. A desirable location on a holiday will have a higher trading power. If you need more trading power to get somewhere you can now use two years trading power (or two weeks of your timeshare) to get where you want to go. Also, if you trade a 4th of July week and trade back into your resort in January you will get trading power to use another time. Our website has become much more advanced lately. You can search units available and what the trading power of your week is and the trading power needed to go somewhere else. We want everything out there for you to see.
Points program, I aquate it to a checking account. You no longer have a week on your account you have a point allocation for that week. Redeeming the points, there are reservations “windows” there is a point where if you come back here you don’t have to pay the $40 fee. Hopefully this is getting better and you won’t have to pay that. This is just the highlights and Jill and I will be available for questions after the meeting for any questions you may have. Thank you guys I appreciate it. (clapping)
Joe Jacobson: As you can all see this is a pretty busy place today. We have two weddings today so RCI will be in the Riveria Room and the luncheon will be in the lower bar. We will need to let them get in here and set up for the wedding.
I want to talk about scores for a minute. I don’t want anyone to think we want a free ride but if there is a problem please call us and let us fix it. We don’t want a free pass if something isn’t right but we want to know if there are problems. Don’t give us a free pass but give RCI decent scores. You can fill out our comment card and tell us exactly what you think but by giving bad scores to RCI you are hurting your trading power.
We talked about building value. Compass resort is selling the resort weeks. There are 485 weeks left to sell and Matt Murphy helped us to find Compass to try to sell my weeks and how to help the association when they get weeks back. He gave me a couple of names and I checked them out. I went with Compass because they deal with mature resorts at reselling weeks. The board said that’s great but what are we going to do for the owners? The deal we came up with is that for every so many weeks of my weeks sold an association week gets sold. Bottom line is there is a list that we came up with. There is a resale form in your packet and you must read the rules. Your dues must be paid and if they aren’t you will drop off the list and if you then catch up you will go back on the list but you will go to the bottom of the list. Compass had high hopes when they started and they sold 10 weeks but then December hit and the snowstorms stopped all the selling and the salespeople wanted to go back to warmer weather. They are starting again now and are very excited about this property and they know they can sell. They will be set up in the Maple Room by the front desk for their sales room. They do 6 or 7 other resorts that they are selling for and are very anxious to start on this resort. I will be available after the meeting for questions on this.
Facilities and Management
There is a lot of information here for you here. We changed beds etc and I will be happy to answer any questions for you after the meeting. You can read the list on your own.
Wi-fi many people have asked about having Wi-fi in the buildings and we are trying it in the golf villas, we have some anteneas in there we need to put up but we think we have found a solution to do the $80/month charge on each building. If it works then we will do the property.
Vicky Anderson is up next. One quick thing when you come up for questions please state your name.
Vicky-has anyone been out to see 14A yet? (person in the crowd “it is beautiful”) the new furniture will be here on Monday.
I want to introduce Maria she came down from the hotel front desk to work with us in the association. Please be kind to her we don’t want to lose her.
Comment cards-please use the ones in your room we want to know the problems but we don’t want you to get hurt in the process.
We have taken the classified section off the website and will replace it with the resale form. You will need to print the resale form and send it to us.
Andy: Thank you Vicky. At this point we will open it up to questions. Please step up to the microphone.
Mike Bodwin from Kenosha: We have been owners for 25 years but we are interested in upgrades. Last time I checked I was told you have to buy new.
Joe: Compass if possible will be able to help you with this. There are only 6 three bedrooms on property but if there are any they would be the ones who can help you.
Nancy Bearns: Now that you are renovating are you also doing the hallways and staircases?
Joe: When the building gets done the whole building gets done. We are also putting a small pad under the stair carpet to make them better.
Kurt Keller: Are all e-mail addresses on the website? (Vicky) all but not Maria’s. For RCI has the formulas changed in all these changes? (Matt) no none of the formulas have changed.
Joe Watchowski: Could we please number the pages in the future. My wife is asking why we are paying real estate taxes when we only have time not real property.
Joe Jacobson: No you actually own real property and it is recorded at the Register of Deeds in Manitowoc.
Joe Watchowski: ok, then that negates my next question regarding the name of the owners association. I own a 2bedroom week that is red and isn’t it the same as a 2 bedroom at any resort.
Joe Jacobson: No, it all depends on how much in demand the resort you want to go to is.
Joe Watchowski: Well if I don’t give my week to RCI I can come to Fox Hills on the week that I own in my unit?
Joe Jacobson: No you need to make a reservation of when you want to come because we are a floating resort. You signed a flex time agreement when you bought because people don’t want to be locked into a specific week every year.
Sherry Kinyear: Hi, we inheritated a week from our parents and we are trying to get out of paying the maintenance fee every year and if anyone wants a 2bedroom blue week my sisters are here and we will gladly sign it over to you.
? Swimming policy is one that can piss off people very quickly. I have grandchildren here today and I can’t get into the rec building. I have heard more people complain about the policy and you need to go back and look at this policy. If you want our grandchildren to see this place they need to get to use it.
Andy farah: I haven’t heard a good suggestion from anybody about how we make this work. Just as we hear from you with your complaint but what about everybody else’s complaint that there are too many people there. I was here by myself and there was a family of 9 people in there and no one did a thing. Vicky help me out here, but I haven’t heard any good comments on how we police this.
? If you are paying minimum wage they should be able to enforce the rules. I have given you several ways on how to enforce the policies.
Vicky: We have several young families here and we have a family that has 7 children and they get to all bring guests. How ever many guests you get, they also get.
Andy: You are an owner and your grandchildren aren’t
? they are in our trust.
Andy: you expect that an employee to know who is in your trust? We could look at maybe allowing this during the off season but is this going to make it more confusing for people to understand the rules? (mumbling). We have talked about this many times and it is always grandchildren that seem to come up as the issue. They do not own. I know the rules and I will not bring my grandchildren here. It is not a public facility. If we change things and expand the rules then we are going to get too many kids in the pool and people will complain about that. I want you all to step up and get on the board to help solve this.
? Do the renovations include painting the condos and repairing the decks and deck rails? How about the road?
Joe: No the buildings are not getting painted and decks are not in the plans right now. The roads will be very expensive to repair. We are patching as necessary.
? I am looking at the $50,000 price to do the building and you guys are doing a great job to redo these for this amount.
Joe: We were very lucky that the economy kind of helped us out. We found a guy who has some furniture that he had sitting in a warehouse and he was anxious to get it out of his warehouse.
Any MacMillan: I have owned for 20 years and exchanged probably 19 times and people are astounded when we trade and we tell them that we own here to use the pool and at most places you can’t even use the pools. Keep that in mind people! (loud clapping).
? How many people are in the wages?
Joe: 50
? do the board members get group insurance?
Joe: no board members don’t get anything for doing this. If you want to talk to Andy you have to call him.
? office space. Where is there office space?
Joe: there are two downstairs here, there are new offices in the Rec Center, maintenance staff space.
Jim Jentsch: Is the north side of the roof in Rec center leaking?
Joe: We had a bunch of roof work done recently and this is a new leak so we will have to have our guys look at this again. The snow blows up under the roof and causes problems.
? first impressions are a big thing and that parking lot when you first come in is horrible.
Joe: I agree. I wish I had a bunch of money because I would replace the parking lot. I paved all the cart paths and I am renovating up in the hotel and then will look into the parking lot.
Lynn Paider: Been an owner for many years. The leak at the pool was here last week when I was here. I saw the newly remodeled unit and it is wonderful. The bedrooms are like walking into a five star hotel. The kitchens are beautiful, I can’t wait to stay in it.
Sandy: I am guessing most resorts want to be Gold Crown etc. What would trading power be if our scores go up with the renovations?
Jill RCI: Trading power isn’t based on Gold Crown, etc. as unit maintenance and unit quality goes up trading power goes up. Utilitization is a bigger part of trading power.
Joe: Do we have a motion to adjourn? We need to get the girls in here for the wedding. Oops! We need to do the drawing. Next meeting will be third Saturday in April in 2012.
Matt Murphy: ticket 940944 for weeks membership. 940979 for free vacation week. No names of winners.
Andy: Motion to adjourn (person gave motion) I need a second (undisclosed person seconded) All approved (loud approval) We are adjourned.
End of recording.
Fox Hills Resort
Owners Association Meeting
April 2009
Meeting Minutes
John Holzschuh: I would like to call the annual Fox Hills Owners’ Association meeting to order. I’m John Holzschuh, the Vice President of Operations at Fox Hills and I’d just like to cover a couple of things quickly before we get into the meeting. Everybody should have pamphlets and handouts, showing budgets, etc., and we also had a vote on a quorum in our annual meeting and we believe we had that to conduct this meeting. Last year we had informed you that we were going to have the meeting on today’s date, which we did. So with that in mind I’d like to cover the agenda and then I’ll some introductions also. The agenda is going to be; I’ll be making some announcements of funds, we’ll talk about some improvements in last year, and Joe will talk about budget issues, and we’ll do a question and answer session like we normally do, and then we’ll do the meeting summary and talk about next year’s meeting date. With that in mind I’m going to introduce everybody; Joe Jacobson, the developer, Dave Petouka, Mike Mlevza, Andy Phara, Vicky Stangel, Ann Francis, and once again myself. (Discussion in background.) Oh, I’m sorry, Vicky Anderson, she got married. I apologize. (Applause) Just can’t break the habit. If you would flip your sheets over if they’re glued or stapled, however you have them, I’d like to briefly talk about 2008 renovations. We had a number of DVDs and T.V. we changed out, mattresses, we added some additional furniture to the condos. We also bought a robotic pool vacuum so we’ve reduced the labor. It operates at night; we just release it and it monitors; it’s picked up and released by security and that helps us keep the pool clean and also reduces the labor, not having somebody man it. We added a refrigerator and we also did signage which everyone has requested for years. I hope you like it. We also had to change the phone system. It really just went kaput and we had no other choice. We did have a lot of complaints by owners not being able to contact Vicky, and we fixed that. We have a new system. We did carpeting in five buildings; and the next two go together, we changed unit doors and we did the keycard lock system through the entire area, which is big improvement. We also did 32 fireplaces, we did some hot water heaters, we replaced two roofs, and then we had a culvert collapse on us because of last years, last Spring’s heavy rain, more into June, early summer and we had to replace that. Also, there’s something missing on here; we did add two handicap rooms in condo 12, so we have handicap accessibility into this year. The capital budget for 2009; we’re looking at replace two more roofs, we are adding five dishwashers, looking at adding five stoves, ten more t.v.s, we want to change hallway carpeting in 11 more condos, exterior paint for buildings 6 and 20, 120 new mattresses and box springs, 10 new water heaters, the dessert air in the pool area, two more handicap units we want to do, and then 6 additional washer and dryer sets, 32 more fireplaces, and then we have a contingency fund which we budget in case of an emergency, like the culvert last year and the phone system; those were two major issues that happened that we hadn’t gotten budgeted. Any questions on what we have done or what we’re proposing? Okay, if you think of them we’ll just cover them at the end. Joe?
Joe: Okay, if you look at your financial, and by the way as John said, if you have any questions you all know the drill, we can answer all kinds of questions when we’re done; the microphone’s up there. We all know we’re living in pretty trying times here, so I actually had the accounting staff do a little drill for me yesterday and check out where we are in dues collections versus previous years. It has slowed down a little recently, we were quite a bit ahead, we’re still $3,000 ahead of last year’s pace which was a big relief to me considering what’s going on out there in the world, I didn’t know how people were paying, but at this point we’re doing okay, so we still have some people that Vicky and the collections department has to chase around, but we’re ahead of last year’s pace at this point. Not by much, but we’re still ahead. Okay, you can see that our actual income versus our budgeted income is pretty darn close. Obviously we took in less money, it means a few less people paid dues then the year before, or a little less interest. Expenses, we were over a little bit on wages and salaries, but I don’t know how many of you keep these for posterity, have old ones, we’ve reduced the wages substantially over the last number of years. I think we’re going to actually track, you notice we’re budgeting less than year and we’ll hit that number. We did have one employee that did have some health problems and we had to get a legal opinion on what we could do and we ended up double staffing the position for a while due to legal councils’ recommendation for part of last year, due to a health issue, or we would have been under budget, and we will be under budget going forward. Oh, there are seats open in the front if you want to come in and sit down, there’s plenty of room up here. Thank you Vicky. Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention I was looking down at my notes here. If anyone has any questions later on any of these we can go through, but as usual I’m going to go through and pick out the ones where there’s a major difference. Obviously electric and gas. We budgeted $275,000, we’re $294,000. If you remember last year’s meeting I did say we were off to a pretty lousy start. The last two winters had been appreciably colder and longer than what we had been running, and we always based our budgets on the previous years. We have done many things to lower the utilities, like the new fireplaces and things. We continue to work on that. I don’t think utilities are going down any. We all saw last year when we had $4.00 gas and what our home bills are like. So it’s not from a lack of effort but we’ve had two long, cold winters here, as well as you’ve had at home. Renovations and maintenance. You’ll see we are $263,000 versus $206,000 that we budgeted. Part of that was the $13,000 for the culvert that collapsed. It was about 10 feet down that we had to dig out. We tried to get a little relief from FEMA, out of New Orleans, but that didn’t work for us, they didn’t think that we qualified. We had to put the phone system in. The phone system on this property dated to when it was built. It was an old PBX system. For at least ten years we’ve been buying used parts where ever we could, searching the internet. I was always hoping we could find an alternative which we finally had to last summer. It just quit and we couldn’t get the parts anymore. The total phone system was aprx. $50,000. It was broke down by the equipment each side of the resort needed. Condo bill was around $25,000, it was a little under half of the phone system. There are a lot more extensions out in the condos than what there are in the hotel with 102, but we need different equipment for the offices and things that cost us more, so I did have the guy when he bid it out break it down separately, but that’s an expense we weren’t anticipating, but as John said now you’re not getting the dropped calls. Some of you when you were calling the offices and things we were starting to have too regularly with the old system. And then we had the, again it’s under the renovations and maintenance, we did mention that last year at this meeting we had an architect coming in drawing plans to make those two rooms handicap accessible and we did get that done. We didn’t have a price ? for it last year at this time because we still had the architect working on it but we did have an owner who wanted that done, and actually there is legal action that can be taken if a place isn’t handicap accessible, so we got that done and that was another $13,000 to do those two units, make them handicap accessible, redo the total bathrooms and everything, so that is where we went over last year in renovations. It all went for good things in the condos. This year we’re budgeting $175,000 vs. the $206,000 last year. In lieu of the economy we don’t even know if we’ll spend that. With some of these projects we just discussed in the board meeting, the board will wait on and we’ll make decisions on as the year goes on, depending upon how things are happening out there. That’s a wish list. Obviously if there’s a roof that’s in bad shape, things like that have to get done, but the improvements of just upgrade, those decisions will be made by your board that you elect, based on what’s happening. We’re a little bit, probably like all of us, we want to keep an eye on what’s going on in the world out there and see how the news continues to come in, if the economy starts to come back or whatever. So, the bottom line is, we got a profit again in actuality of $109,000, certainly it’s less then what we budgeted and less than last year part of it over on expenses in the renovations and obviously in the utilities. I’ll be happy, I’m sure there’ll be a few questions on this one, when we get to the question and answer period and I’ll be here to answer those.
John: Anybody have any questions at all about the budget? Yes sir? Could you go to the mic so we can all hear you? Thank you very much because we record this. We record this so there’s minutes and we keep them and that’s what we should be doing by law. Thank you.
? : My question is what are the management fees? I see wages and salaries and then I see management fees.
Joe: Management fee is traditionally what somebody charges you to manage the property. Your wages cover the actual people doing the housekeeping, the laundry, whatever, but there has to be somebody on the payroll to actually make decisions, you know, give some direction. So traditionally, management fees are 10% of dues revenue, that’s how most associations do it. We froze our management fees a number of years ago. We did that with the board of directors. We said we’d freeze them because the association at that time was in a little bit of a financial crunch. If we were raising them like most management companies did, they’d be a little over $200,000 a year right now. I and my staff spend a lot time out here, and we’re not on the payroll. I spend a good part of my time, as well as plenty of other people, out here working on this and that’s where that comes in, they’re not on the Fox Hills payroll. Like for instance, the accounting staff, when you see professional fees, that’s done out of our office. We used to have ADP for payroll, automated data processing, you may have heard of them they do a lot of payroll. That used to cost us about $60,000 a year. Right now we do all of our accounts payable, all of our payroll and everything for professional fees that are under half of that because they are done by people who work for me, and at the management company, but there are no wages for them. Part of the reason your association wages have gone down close to $200,000 in the last five years is we’ve eliminated some of those positions they used to have on staff out here where they did the payroll out here, or they did accounts payable out here at the resort and things like that. We’ve centralized them, I have some other companies, I’ve centralized them there, so that all falls under the heading of management company. Yes sir?
? : Why are there no charges for bad debts . . . did you quit trying to collect them?
Joe: No, that’s a good question. We just went through that at the board meeting. I’ll probably get more lengthy than I need to, but I’ll try to keep this brief. The computer system we bought two years ago for the association had an upgrade last year which made it very difficult to track our income. It didn’t bring the credit cards across properly. We got a new upgrade, everybody, not just us, but all customers were a little unhappy. We got a new upgrade about a month or so ago, which allowed us to do that. We always new what the expenses were and stuff. We were having a little trouble, we knew what we were depositing in the bank, but what came in the credit cards; who paid what unit. So that’s all squared away now, so we didn’t file our taxes yet. They should have been done by April 15th. Because we just got this upgrade we’re going to be filing them shortly. How we decide what to right off for bad debts is, there’s bad debts out there, and we’re always trying to collect them, but some of the bad debts you’ll remember, I’ve explained this in the past, that some of these bad debts there here pre-us. They’ve been here over ten years and what we do is we decide to write off what we think is uncollectible and also what factors into that is the accountants, the attorney, sit down and look at the income tax, the association never had to pay income tax in prior years because they were never cash positive. Now that the association is cash positive, we have to pay income tax. So part of what they decided to write off each year is number one for tax purposes, number two it’s really uncollectible. You know we’re still chasing people on a regular basis to answer that question. But I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that’s exactly what we didn’t collect. Some of these debts are people we couldn’t even contact, they passed away or they moved out of the state and the attorney then has to advertise and try to find if anybody knows where they are for us to foreclose on them or go after them for the dues and sometimes that’s a long drawn out process. So there is stuff out there that we could almost always write off that is totally uncollectible, or bankruptcy or whatever. But Vicky, overall how are collections going? What she’s saying is we continue to make the progress we’ve talked about, the collections are better each year obviously there’s a new crop that comes up. There’s people that find themselves in financial duress like with what’s going on the world right now, lost a job or something. It seems like every year you get some new people you know that something’s happen in their life and they can’t pay, but we continue to very, very diligently go after collections. So, . . . ? mentioned this a number of times. When the Fox Hills Owners’ Association was in the dark days with some of our predecessors and I don’t need to name names, most of you know who we’re talking about, they didn’t even tell you how bad it was. I brought that up a number of years ago and said okay, this is the situation, this is how much is out there. We’ve always brought it up, and there is a legacy of bad debts out there that pre-dates us, and for tax purposes we’re taking those so the association doesn’t need to give the IRS any more than they have to. But it isn’t, what you see on that statement really is not a factor of what we’re trying to collect. We’re trying to collect it all. Some of the things we’re trying to do, until somebody else has a question, I’ll just tell you a little bit what we’re working on. Obviously we think utilities are going to be, continue to rise. It’s going to be an on-going problem forever. The new fireplaces that we’ve been putting in, all of the old fireplaces had 8” vents going straight up, they were damperless, it was just like having an 8” hole open in the side of your building all the time. That’s making a big difference. We had Focus On Energy come in, we had a professional come in where they pressurize your building and they come in with infra-red and they test where you have heat leakage and so forth. We did all that before we started changing the fireplaces, things like that. The new water heaters, every one of these condominiums out here had a 120 gallon electric hot water heater in it. I don’t mean every building, I mean every unit. Four hundred eighty gallons worth of hot water we were heating 365 days a year, 24/7, in each one of these buildings. Some of you’ve done some research on this perhaps for yourself. In Europe and in Asia, everywhere besides the U.S., they don’t use tank heaters. They use tankless on demand heaters. The units we’ve been putting in in the condos are actually less money than the 120 gallon one. We’re putting in tankless on demand units. By the time we wire them, because it takes a little different wiring, they are 220 versus, or they’re more circuits, more 220 circuits, but they’re on demand, so when there isn’t somebody calling for hot water, your not in the shower or whatever, it’s going to be a huge energy savings. We’re monitoring, we put eight of them in on test, we’re monitoring the savings, but according to the engineers and Focus on Energy and everybody it should be a big savings to us, so if any of you ever come up with ideas or see them at home or anything, we’re always, John was just at a WPS seminar last week, we’re always looking at ways to do this, but gee we’re not geniuses so if anybody had a good idea or may come up something, or see it on t.v., pass it along to us or one of your board members because I think that’s the number one things we’re going to have to continue to fend off is rising utilities. Sir?
?: Getting back to these bad debts, what really happens with that as far as these people don’t pay and stuff like that, as far as their estates and everything?
Joe: What happens is many times, say if it’s a, well there’s many different examples, somebody may have passed on or there may have been a divorce or bankruptcy, normally in a bankruptcy, and I see Vicky left, she’s the expert, but I believe that in a bankruptcy they quit claim the deed back to us, sometimes we have to go through all the rigmarole, like if we can’t find the people and advertise to get them to do that, but normally we collect, we’ll get a judgment for whatever we can get from the judge, you know we go in front of a judge and they say yes you need to pay ‘x’ amount dollars and normally they will then give their title up because, or some don’t some pay it, but obviously if they don’t pay us they can’t use the week. They’re a bunch of people out there now who can’t bank with RCI who can’t come onto the property, they’re barred from using their membership privileges when they’re behind.
?: They’re barred from using their membership, but what I’m saying is what really happens to the estate part of it? Does it go back to you then?
Joe: The week?
?: Well, the property itself, we’re partly ownership on that, that’s what we’re paying on.
Joe: Right, I don’t know if we’ve foreclosed on many lately. When we had an on-going sales program, your board at that time would give them back to us to resell because the board didn’t have a resale program. Nothing is really going on right now. I don’t think that I’ve got any back recently. We’ve just been getting people to pay their dues, but we talked about that today in our board meeting. That is something that we’re going to address in our next board meeting. What are we going to do in the future about that situation? We’re going to have a board meeting next month with our newly elected board on that situation. Yes sir?
?: Okay, I can see where our expenses and budget are actual, and we actually have an operating plus of $109,000? (Joe: Correct) I don’t see a line item listing that and what the association actually has as a cash surplus because we did a surplus last year also? (Joe: Correct) Now last year’s plus this year’s, but that’s not listed anywhere on the . . .
Joe: We should have mentioned this earlier. We do this every year. We do have balance sheets here. Vicky you have balance sheets? Anybody who wants a balance sheet after the meeting, Vicky has them. Again, if you want to see a balance sheet on this, let your board members know. The board of directors several years ago decided to give balance sheets only to people who asked because a lot of people didn’t understand them. We do have them up here, we should have announced that right away.
?: The only reason I bring it up is because you and I both know that where’s there’s a dollar, there’s a crook. And we found that out in Washington and the stock market.
Joe: No, I agree. And one of your board members has brought up doing an audit. We have somebody independent do the taxes, we’ll get another price on doing an audit. We did have a CPA on the board a number of years ago who wanted to do an audit and we got some bids and then he decided he thought it was a little too expensive. From his expertise he thought that the books looked fine. One of your board members has talked about that. Hey, those are all good ideas. We should know where we’re at all the time.
?: One more question. Where are the fees that we pay the lawyers to do the things for the association?
Joe: Professional fees. (?: Professional fees? Okay) Yeah, it’s under professional fees. Professional fees cover legal fees, they cover accounting, payroll and accounts payable. All that stuff is processed. I guess I wasn’t clear enough before. The part of that that gets paid to the Jacobson Group is some $30,000 a year, is that right Ann, $25,000 a year. That’s what I was talking about before. ADP alone used to cost us $60,000 to do our payroll. Now we do all accounts payable, all payroll, and all accounting for $25,000 a year. Some of that’s attorney’s fees, income tax preparation goes out to somebody independent, that is not connected to myself or any of the companies here, that goes to Hawkins, Ash, Baptee (?) in De Pere. They do that so that’s all under professional fees. The legal, payroll, all of those things. I would like to say to that we haven’t had an RCI rep for the last few years. It isn’t that we don’t want them to come. I don’t know if they’re trying to cut cost or if they don’t want to answer your questions but it was nice when they came and had a little presentation, so if any of you are talking to RCI let them know that you like it when your owner rep shows up and can talk to us about RCI. More questions? One other thing I should tell you about, you may have read about it, if you’ve read about the new swimming pool issues. There was a young girl a year or two ago that got stuck to a drain in a swimming pool and drowned. There’s new Federal regulations, but so often when happens when it’s a government deal, they don’t really know what they want us to do at this point. We’ve had people in, we’ve had engineers in, we’ve looked at the systems on the pools. There will have to be some work done on the swimming pool in the next year or two. Originally it was all supposed to be done this year. There’s a moratorium on it now until the powers that be, OSHA and congress who did the bill can decide exactly what the bill means and what we have to do. Basically the covers on the drains need to get changed somehow so that somebody can’t get stuck to it. Because by the time you shut the drain off, obviously, and loosen that suction the person may have already drowned. It happened one time so now every pool in the country needs to get changed since it’s happened once in history. So, we do not have it in the budget. We have it under contingency because we have no idea what it’s going to cost us at this point. But in case any of you are concerned, you read it in the paper about this, I know I saw it a few weeks ago, this is a national deal. I just want you to know we are aware of it and we’re working on it, but we’re not going to, if we would have made improvements according to what the first bill said, we would have spent the money and now they would have told us that gee, now that doesn’t work anymore, we’ve changed it. We’re waiting until we have definite, we have Senator Feingold’s office keeping us up to date and finding out exactly what we need to do, because it seems on the state level, which their charged to enforce a federal rule, they don’t really understand it either. They don’t even understand it on the federal level so I don’t know how the state could so we’re hoping our elected officials will be able to keep us in the loop. Mam?
?: I have been a Fox Hills owner since 1986 and at the time that we purchased our unit we were promised pool privileges that we could bring company and friends along within reason and I’ve seen the promises that were made by Fox Hills to owners, eroding, eroding, eroding until there isn’t hardly anything left. Now if I want to bring my son and daughter-in-law and their child, I can’t do it without paying extra or; and yet the people who work here can bring their entire families to swim and use the facilities.
Joe: That’s not correct. No (?: No?) The person who works here can’t. We did talk about this last year at this meeting. The bylaws have always said an owner can bring a guest and somebody did ask us, well what happens if my grandkids are here and so forth, and there’s an exemption for party, right? So you’re saying there’s an exemption for the party, but then you have to pay for it. It’s $2.00 a person or something. Okay. What I would suggest is, we talked about this in this meeting last year and we weren’t given any advice. We’re just following the by-laws as they’ve always been written. Now what a salesman told you and what the by-laws were may have been different, and I’m not saying that’s right, if you’d like to see a change, call one of your board members. We’ll make that change in the board meeting. We have to think about how we do that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to bring in your people, but then what do you do with people who abuse it and show up with 30 people? That’s why the board last year, we had some of those instances where that’s why the board reaffirmed, they didn’t change anything, they just reaffirmed the policy that had always been there. Ninety-nine percent of you that would never be an issue and I don’t anyone is going to say anything if you show up with a couple people, but then you get the few people who want to bring in 30 kids for a birthday party and you’re there trying to enjoy the pool and you can’t enjoy the pool.
?: Well and I guess if somebody brings in 30 people, Fox Hills should say something to that person who brings in 30 people.
Joe: Well correct. But you know who interprets the rule. There’s a rule there and the rule right now says each owner can bring in a guest. Now the rule can get changed. All the board was asked last year by one of the / you owners had it brought it up at the board meeting last year, called somebody or had Vicky bring it up, what about the rule and the board at that time, not having any other input decided to leave the rule as it always stood. We may be enforcing it different. That’s probably the issue. That now that there’s somebody down there all the time, that the office is down there, that we may be enforcing the rule we weren’t in the past, and I’m not saying that that’s right, it’s right to enforce the rule, I’m not saying it’s been enforced the same as it always was. There wasn’t always somebody down there before. There was just a part time kid giving towels out, so we maybe need to adjust that policy. We’ve got it in the minutes and feel free everybody to pass your comments on to your board members because we’ll be happy to, right gentleman? Right now, if you have five people in your family, on that membership, you can bring five guests the way it’s written up. It’s one guest per owner member in the family. So if have my husband and I are owners, and my son at one time was on that membership because he was a minor, what happens to that now. He’s no longer a minor, and I do know the rule has changed since we purchased into this ownership.
Joe: I don’t think the rule changed, I think the enforcement changed.
?: Hhmm, no the rule changed. Yes it did. The rule has changed.
Joe: Well, in the ten years I’ve been around, that I know, we’ve never changed anything in those by-laws to do with that. So I think the enforcement of the rule, I could be wrong and we’ll go back and look, but I think the enforcement got changed just because there’s people down there. But, hey it’s your association. Give people input.
?: I’ll do that, thank you. (Some applause.)
Joe: And thank you for the input. That’s how we get things done. Nobody be bashful to bring things up. We can’t improve things if we don’t have your input. I’d much rather have somebody tell us if they have a problem than just be mad about it. That’s how we get things done. (Thank you sir.)
?: I have a problem and I’m mad about it. I came to the rec center Monday morning at 10:00 a.m., no problem, I love the hot tub. For the last 20 years I have used the facility 3 – 5 times a week except when I’m traveling. Wednesday morning I came, 10:00 no problem to use the hot tub. Came yesterday afternoon at 4:30, and I believe the girl’s name was Allison, she said I’m sorry but I can’t honor that card of yours, it’s an old card you’ll have to come back Monday morning and get a new card I won’t let you in. I said I’ve got an $11,000 timeshare, Presidential red week, I pay $500 a year in maintenance, and you’re not going to let me in. I said what if I came from Milwaukee with a girlfriend with a bottle of wine to sit in the hot tub? You’re not going to let me in? Nope, can’t let you in. My boss said you can not come in with that card; this week. (Joe: Well let me ask you . .) So what did I do, I went to the hotel. I don’t own the hotel. I don’t own any part of the hotel. I went in there used the hot tub in the hotel. I couldn’t use the rec center. Now talk about guests, yeah the rule has been changed, but I’m an owner and I could not get in. Really sweet.
Joe: Okay, one second. (Background discussion.) Okay the consensus is here sir that it definitely is our mistake, it shouldn’t have happened. It is a new employee and they said you do have an old, old card that should be update, but that is no excuse. She should have been apprised of the situation that there are some old cards out there and she should have let you in. It’s our mistake. So I would encourage you to come in and get a new card, but there is no excuse for it. We can apologize, but that doesn’t help.
?: Absolutely. She was very nice, very firm, she wasn’t rude or anything. She just said under no circumstances can anyone get in without the approved card.
Joe: Well, we didn’t do the job then to make her apprised that there are some old cards out there. I apologize, but it’s our fault. Shouldn’t of happened and I’m sorry. (Someone asking a question from further back in the room.) Joe: Yes, I heard that. The question was, somebody hollered out from the crowd, couldn’t she have pulled up his ownership? Vicky? She could of. She’s brand new, it was one of her first days on the job, it’s a mistake, it shouldn’t have happened. Believe we’ll / they’ll get some, ya know, somebody’s new on the job, all of us make mistakes, it’s not an excuse. It’s good that he brought that up because we can take back now and use that in training in the future to make sure people have a list of what to do if that comes up. It was very unfortunate. Ma’am?
?: I was wondering, on some of the units, like unit 7, I always request a lower unit because some of my people are handicap, not handicap but semi-handicapped, but there’s the outside stairs and I was wondering if there’s a possibility that at least one railing could be put up on those outside steps.
Joe: Okay, on the units that have, like some of them have that little bit of slope and a few steps.
?: Yes, like 7 steps to get to the units. The units are fine . .
Joe: Yes, cause they’re flat once you get in. Particularly if you’re here in the winter or something, I agree. Okay, we can put that in the notes that we look at that. It’s a good point.
?: My husband and I would like to turn over our RCI to our son. How do we go about doing this?
Joe: See Vicky Stangel, Anderson excuse me, I’m in that old habit yet too right after the meeting. She can explain how to do that.
?: Which one? Okay Thank you.
(Some background discussion at the front table ? back to the membership card subject.)
Joe: What is the approved membership card? The newer one with no picture, brown and burgundy she says, cause I know you can’t all hear. If you don’t have one you can just stop down there and get one. Regardless even if you have the old one, hopefully after today that never happens again. We can mail them too. If you lose your card or have an old card, call, we’ll mail you one. Sir?
?: This concerns the pool policy. How do we get in touch with our board members in order to give them input and discuss the situation a lot of other people are concerned with here.
Joe: Today, as most of you know, you voted, there’ll be an election at the end of this meeting since you got to vote here, many of the ballots were sent in by mail. We will count the ballots and a newsletter will be coming out, being put on-line, if you don’t have the internet call so we can send you one that will have the results of the election, who your board members are and how to contact them will be in the newsletter.
?: Okay . . . I was just thinking since there was some pool discussions here wouldn’t it be a smart thing for us to head into a situation where we have like a user fee for the condo pool area let’s say, now I come from Kewaunee, I’m a member of a fitness center there and they have a pool and hot tub and what they do is any kids under seven years of age get in free, anybody over seven pays $5.00. (Grumbling in the background by the owners . . . we’re already paying $500 a year . . . ) I realize that, but I think we gotta get this pool situation taken care of because I have three grandchildren and we were turned away a couple of months ago because we were over the limit of one grandchild and I was a little disgusted. Obviously we went over to the hotel and had no problem, but we need to get this issue of the condo pools taken care of.
Joe: I would agree because if you’re in one pool or the other, we’ll have to address this as a board, because either way, like the other gentleman you’ll have the inconvenience of going over to the pool in the hotel and either way you’re using the facilities but it’s a convenience matter, it’s not stopping anybody from using it, but it sure is inconvenient, so everybody look for that newsletter, get your thoughts to your new board members because it is a fine line. You wouldn’t have had a problem with your three grandchildren but the person who shows up with 13 or 14 of them and then there’s people trying to enjoy the pool, we just have to come up with something that works for everybody.
?: Well maybe what you have to do is have a separate policy for large groups, groups over 5 or 6. That would be a special idea.
Joe: That’s a good idea, we’ll definitely take that in. Yes maam?
?: We haven’t been here for the last couple years staying in our unit. Does this pool policy, is it applying to people who bring two couples with them, you mean to tell me those three couples can’t go swimming together?
Joe: If you’re staying on the property, let’s clarify this. Anybody who’s staying on the property can go in the pool, and your guests. So if you have two other couples in your unit, yes, cause you all have cards, you don’t even ask, you just go in there. It’s, and I’m not saying this couldn’t have been done in error at some time, but everyone staying on property should be able to get into that pool.
?: Okay, that was my question.
Joe: It’s if you come in, as the gentleman drove in to use it and normally he should have got in with his card but he had the old and we had the new employee. It normally is, if you’re bringing people in, and as I said, if you come in with a small group it’s not an issue. If you bring in 13 kids for a birthday party and there all, like I have two teenagers. If I bring one of my kids with 13 of their friends and they run around like wild Indians while you’re trying to enjoy the pool that wouldn’t go over too well. (?: Definitely) But we need to find that fine line that works everybody. I agree that we need to look at this.
?: When were the new cards issued? How old are the old cards?
Joe: The old ones are over five years old. No, the new ones we’ve had out for over five years. The old ones all have pictures Vicky? Okay, she said there’s some cards dating back even pre-the-picture cards and the picture cards are old. The news ones are burgundy or brownish. They don’t have your pictures on and regardless, you will be able to use that card, we’ll get that straightened away today, but if you have an old card just call, email, we’ll send you one.
?: Okay, thank you. (Joe: Thank You)
?: Prior to the internet site they were allowing the owners to advertise in the newsletter. Because we have two units we’d like to get rid of, actually give away, and it’s just not fitting our lifestyle anymore and I wonder, I called people who were advertising in the newsletter to see how much response they got. I think I called every person, every newsletter and they had none. So I’m hoping that the internet site might be more successful because as I said this isn’t the best time to try to sell them so even giving them away, and I’m wondering if advertising on the site has been more successful.
Joe: We just put it on this, so it is new that we’re going onto the internet. Hopefully more people will take the time to look at it and yet there are people who don’t have the internet either and yet you can look at it at your leisure. I don’t know how it works at your house, but at my house sometimes what I call the circular file fills up, but sometimes I take the time to go through it all and sometimes the stack gets too high, your busy and you don’t go through it all. Sometimes things get into that pile that I wish wouldn’t have gotten in there.
?: So, we’re sitting in the back if anybody wants two timeshares. (Some background discussion.)
Joe: All right, thank you ma’am.
?: I’ve got another comment on my first being here and then I want to follow up on what this lady talked about. I had my current ID in a little Valese (? Bag) where my shampoo is in and everything, set it down outside in the lobby. I was gone for about 10 minutes, came back and it was gone, so my card was stolen along with my shampoo, so that’s why I used my old card which should have been valid. (Joe: I agree, it should have.) Now as a follow up to this lady. I don’t know how many buildings we have, about 20 buildings? (Joe: 22 actually.) Okay with four units per building that’s 80 . . . say 90 units at 50 weeks a unit, 2 off and whatever you set aside for RCI, we should have like 4000 owners (Joe: A little over 5000 actually because some are alternate week owners.) Okay 5000 owners are supporting our budget every year, now it’s $500 a person, right, I think, at least that’s what I pay?
Joe: Well, when I say 5,000 there aren’t that many weeks when I said owners. Some are alternate years so they only pay, you know if I own even and you own odd we make a whole so that’s one $500, so we’d have to go back to week. So don’t use my 5000 number because there are less weeks than that.
?: Okay, my concern is that we’re no longer selling, and we’re not sold out right?
Joe: No, there’s less than 10% left, but no we’re not.
?: Okay we’re not sold out, we’re not selling, there’s obviously attrition through bankruptcy and all this other, death, etc., people want to give them away, in 5 – 10 years we might have 1000 people supporting the whole budget which would put our maintenance fee at $2000 a year.
Joe: Well we are, we did talk about that in today’s board meeting. One of the people running for the board has suggested we look at that. We have looked at different ways to do things in the past. (First side of tape ended . . . ? Continuing . . . ) . . . came about. You remember when all of you were solicited years ago, most of it was through the telephone. We’ve tried mailing, we’ve tried other things. We have not been able to generate a steady tour flow. In the last year or so we haven’t made an attempt. We did try several times. We are going to talk about that as a board in our next meeting. I know at least one of the people who ran for the board, if you read there comments in the newsletter, wants to make that a priority and we’ll have to see what we can do. I totally agree with your comments. I’ve talked about that with our staff here, what do we do in the future as people get older? Some give them to their children, some will them, some sell them, but some don’t. Sometimes they pass away, there’s no will and they’re in limbo for a long time. Or they just get in a situation where they can’t pay. There is no doubt that we need to figure out a solution for that and it was discussed at the board meeting prior to this and will be on the agenda at the next board meeting. Ma’am?
?: I have two comments today. One is going back to the swimming pool and the number of people in. We also come out here with our children all the time and now they’ve grown and they have spouses or friends they want to come with. We only live a little over an hour from here, so sometimes we want to come out and go golfing with them. Well it would be nice to go into the pool and relax after golfing a round, but all of a sudden now, because we aren’t staying and they’re adults, we can’t go in the pool with them because we have too many. We have three children, they bring their friends, so all of a sudden we have a group of 8 now. What’s the difference if we come over and decide to stay once or twice after golfing and want to go in the pool with them to somebody who lives closer and might use the pool facilities three times a week and they’re just using it for themselves or with a friend? Usage wise we’re using it a lot less, but we’re denied because the once or twice we’re using it we want to use extra people with us. So just another point to look at when you’re reviewing that.
Joe: Right, no I think there’s no doubt from all the comments made that the board, we need to sit down and come up with a happy medium that can accommodate more of our owners. I think that’s pretty clear from all the comments here.
?: And my other point was, I just wanted to say that we did attend the wine and cheese gathering last night. It was attended better than the previous one was. I’m glad that we did bring that back and we got to visit with a lot of different owners that we haven’t met before. It was nice gathering and getting together with them so I want to thank you for bringing that back. (Applause)
Joe: Well, and again we brought that back at the direction of some of you last year. As you said, it had been getting pretty sparsely attended, people weren’t using it very much so the decision was made not to do it because, and I think this year we actually got that donated so it wasn’t even an expense to the association. So it’s even better if we can do things for the association when there’s no cost. That was one of the reason that board decided not to do it a few years ago because there were so few people there and even if we only charged cost of the wine and cheese, it’s an expense and it wasn’t being utilized. So if you get a lot of people there and they use it that’s great, and we’ll continue to try to find low cost alternatives like we did this year. Ma’am
?: Yes, I have two things. One is I think that maybe we need better communication between the board and the owners. For example, the cards. We’ve had our cards forever and we had no idea that there were updated cards. So I don’t know, it seems to be just from the comments that I’ve heard that we do need a better communication between RCI board and RCI owners. I think that would help clarify a lot of items. Then if people have questions they have somewhere to go. I mean we don’t utilize the pool at all, but I can see the questions and concerns people are bringing up. And maybe there needs to be better clarification, maybe some opinions, you know maybe some poll done. Something so we can get our voices out there also.
Joes: I agree. Vicky just said, the information about the cards over the years has been in newsletters periodically. Not everybody always reads them cover to cover. Who knows, they go out bulk mail. Was everybody even always getting one? It will be on the website now and with the technology we have today as far as you can email back or email board members or call. Good communication is always, you know nobody can get anywhere in the world without good communication. So it’s a good point.
?: My other comment is, I’d like to no what caused us to lose our status as a silver crown resort? I know that it has to do with the questionnaires that are filled out. You know if we’re filling them out, and we’re saying we don’t like this and we don’t like that, yes it counts towards it, but what was it in particular that caused us to lose that silver crown rating?
Joe: We were 1/10 of a point low in unit quality and 1/10 of a point low in housekeeping.
?: And that’s in the units? (Joe: Yes) Okay Alright. I was just curious because we’ve been to so many different resorts, we exchange quite often, and I have to say that when I look at our resort compared to others, I can’t see where we’re lacking, I don’t see the difference I suppose so I guess that’s the big question. Is there something besides that, that is causing that?
Joe: Well, the scores we’re happy to show you. I think part of, there’s several issues and people who have been here a long time have heard me say this in the past. When we look at the scores, and it tells, when we look at the scores and it tells if you traded in from Grand Geneva or you traded in from Christmas Mountain or you’re a Fox Hills owner. Nobody rates Fox Hills worse than the Fox Hills owners.
?: Yes and we need kind of realize that. (Joe: Always) Yeah, and we kind of realize that because we’ve been to Lake Geneva and we’ve been to Christmas Mountain and I have to tell you that compared to our units, they have nothing over us so that’s the thing. So maybe Fox Hills owners also need to realize that when you fill out those comment cards you’re kind of hurting yourselves. So maybe instead of filling out the comment cards, maybe what we should be doing is coming to the board (Joe: Exactly) and saying this is what we need to do. (Background applause) Don’t fill out those comment cards. Go to the board and tell them because we’re losing points by us filling out things and saying this isn’t good and this isn’t good. It’s not necessarily getting fixed that way. It’s causing us points. It’s causing us our rating, so maybe what we need to do is instead of filling out the comment cards is go to the board or go to whoever it is you talk to so we can keep our rating.
Joe: The management company, the board. We don’t want a free pass. That’s a very good comment, thank you. We don’t want a free pass. We want to know if things are goofed up. Just like the gentleman before who couldn’t get in. We can’t fix it if we don’t know. If you leave the unit and there’s something wrong with that unit and you don’t tell us. Say, I don’t care if somebody accidentally broke something and you say it was like that when you got there because you’re worried about being billed for it or something. Just tell us because otherwise the next two people who come in there if nobody says anything then we’ve got three bad scores in a row and we don’t know it. You know we don’t know it if you’re not getting enough hot water out of the shower or if it’s coming out too slow or whatever. So do it. We don’t want a free pass. Come down and chew on me or chew on John if we aren’t doing our job right. Call your board people and have them chew on us, but don’t give us a free pass. But don’t go giving us terrible RCI scores because our owners and we’ve talked about this here and we’ve had it in the newsletter, our owners give us the worst scores of anybody. And the other thing that has happened is three years ago RCI went to a total new rating system. Most of us in the resorts are not very happy with that system at all. RCI has not been very good at listening to it. Some of you know, maybe some of you don’t. It was in the newsletter. There was a class action lawsuit by owners like yourself against RCI for them not letting people know what was available to trade and RCI didn’t admit they did anything wrong but yet they settled the suit and agreed to pay a pittance, but they have now at least agreed to make it so people can see what available out there, they’ve changed their policies. I’m hoping through things like that that we get them to listen a little more. We were international distinction, which is now silver crown, five, six years in a row until they changed the scoring. I don’t see where anything has changed drastically on our end other than we’re putting in newer fireplaces, trying to make the place better, and yet the scoring structure has changed. We continue to complain about that as many other resorts do I know and we’re hoping they’ll finally start to listen. Ma’am
?: With today’s economy, everybody’s either losing their jobs or like the retired people have lost a lot of their money out of their IRAs. Isn’t there a possibility of us having a couple more payment options regarding our maintenance fees like spread it out between 12 months instead of 6 months?
Joe: That’s definitely an option the board can look at. I can tell you why it wasn’t done in the past. It was brought up in the past. When the association had huge liability, obviously delaying it even if you did it quarterly, you’d pay interest for that next quarter. You know the association was accumulating interest versus being able to pay those loans down at the beginning of the year. They’re in a different situation now so it’s probably time that the board looks at that.
?: Alright and it’s a lot easier to pay in a 12 month time than a 6 months and with the way that the economy is right now you know there’s jobs being cut, my job’s being cut, you know, (Joe: It’s a good point.) you know it’d be a lot easier to pay in a 12 month time than 6 in months.
Joe: Yeah, and like I say it was discussed at the time, in fact that’s why the board moved, you remember a number of years ago, it was twice a year and they moved it all to the beginning of the year because I think the calculation back then was going to save like $75,000 a year in interest by having that money six months sooner, back when the association had more liability than they do today. So it was purely an economic decision made by the board back then, but that said, it’s probably time to revisit that.
?: Another thing I wanted to be brought up and I brought this up at the meeting last year was the bathrooms in the units. The grout has not been ever cleaned every time that we come to the units. (Joe: The grout?) The grout in the bathrooms. (Joe: Alright) Take a toothbrush and clean them. (Joe: Alright . . . thank you.) Yes sir?
?: Just a suggestion on your inventory of timeshares you own. (Joe: Yes) I was at a place in Florida several years ago, when I checked in I was given a sheet, no high pressures, these are the weeks we have available and a price on them. It was a reasonable price. I bought one. (Joe: That’s a good idea.) I was in Hawaii two weeks ago. They had a quick presentation. They were very reasonably priced. I did it about an hour before I left. If I would have had some to think about it I probably would have bought one there also. The other thing I was going to say. As far as the pool, I think it’s restrictive, but one other thing I’d like to say is they’ve done a good job of cleaning up down there. It was filthy down there five, six years ago. I had an opportunity to go there a couple months ago and I was really pleased with the way the place looked. With that, thank you. (Joe: Thank you. Some applause.)
Joe: Yes ma’am.
?: Hi. You said we should bring up concerns here, so here it goes. You put in some new hot water heaters. (Joe: Correct) We’re staying in a condo this weekend and we could not get any hot water in the kitchen. (Joe: You are staying in which unit, 1B?) Yes (laughter). Word has gotten around, huh?
Joe: I had a discussion with the maintenance man this morning actually, because that’s my project putting those in. I don’t exactly, we have 8 of those in. That unit there’s three chambers to that unit. One of them was bad when we put it in. I just got a replacement part last week and we installed it. I don’t know if there’s still a problem. It was all under warranty and when I came in this morning the maintenance man told me about your trouble. He said, and it’s a very strange thing obviously because you have hot water in the bathrooms, so we will be looking at that. I really appreciate the feedback. The first one went in in November, a couple in January. We’ve had plenty of people stay there and no issues. I’m not quite certain what’s going on in this one. It seems pretty strange to me that we have hot water in the bathrooms but not in the kitchen. I don’t know if somebody accidentally turned a valve off somewhere, but we will get back to that. Gary, the maintenance man, informed me of that this morning. (?: Okay, thank you.) Thank you; and this is the place to bring that stuff up by the way.
?: I have a question concerning, if we purchased time in the past from Fox Hills and then we were to purchase time lets say from another private owner, how would that work as far as being able to trade that with RCI?
Joe: If you, and I’m going to say this and then I’m going to look to Vicky and make sure I say it right because I am not an expert here. If you are an RCI member, is there an add-on fee Vicky, for multiple weeks? He’s asking if he buys another week? No. Are you points or weeks. (?: We’re points right now.) Points? (?: If we wanted to convert it to points it would be an additional fee for that?) So you acquired another week; if you acquire points week already that that person’s already enrolled in and I’m not sure what the fee is if you have to pay the same fee annually or if there’s a discount if you have two weeks in points. If you have multiple weeks in weeks, you pay once per year no matter how many weeks you have correct? (to Vicky) But he has one unit in points already? (?: We bought one from Fox Hills and I’m thinking about acquiring one from somebody else.) She’s (Vicky) telling me RCI has a one-time fee to roll that week into points if it was a weeks week; if it’s a points week already I don’t think that would be an issue (?: Okay), but if it’s a weeks week RCI still wants to charge you to put it into points. (?: And how much would that be?) She believes its $1,500 but we can check on that for you. (?: Okay) And that’s not our fee, that’s RCI’s fee. (?: Okay, I understand, thank you.)
Joe: Those kind of questions, I’ll be honest with you I’m not the expert, I trade once in a while, but I go to the gals that work with RCI all the time because I don’t feel comfortable answering those questions, it’s not my expertise. Yes sir?
?: We bought our timeshare about 11 years ago and I would not have been to Panama or to some of the Bahamas and things if I would not have and that’s one of the reasons we did and we stayed a couple of weeks here, but we would like to get rid of our timeshare. If we transfer our timeshare, is their a transfer fee that your association assesses us?
Joe: Okay. These are deeded properties, we don’t have a fee. Vicky can help you . . (?: No they’re not deeded properties they’re deeded timeshare in a certain property.) Right, right. But you actually have deed. (?: Yes) Right, so that has to be transferred at the courthouse. Our people can help you with that on how to do that. We have the paperwork. There’s a small fee for that which is the Manitowoc County fee; we do not have a fee. (?: You do not have a fee?) Correct And by the way you’ll remember a few years ago at the direction, well I thought it was fair, but at the direction of the ownership group here, the bylaws used to say, not bylaws, our rules used to be that we inherited that; if you sold it to anybody, all the rights didn’t go with them. They could stay here but they couldn’t come in and use the fitness center and all that except when they were on property. I rescinded that a number of years ago so if you want to give one to your children or a friend or whatever or will it to somebody or sell it to somebody, the reason the previous ownership had done that is they wanted people to buy it from them. Not through the secondary market because you couldn’t get as much; as many rights. We changed that so all of your rights transfer when you transfer that week. Most of you know that. I just wanted to reiterate that in case anyone had forgotten.
?: Then you do not have a fee. We have an organization coming through Green Bay that’s offering to take the timeshares off our hands for $2,900. We give them $2,900 and they will take it and the reason for them not taking certain timeshares is because there is a transfer fee and he said some fees are as much as $750 and that’s the reason for asking.
Joe: Well, there may be some places that a transfer fee, but we do not.
?: The only fee is the courthouse fee? I think it was $15 or something last time, registered.
Joe: We’re going to get some commentary on this situation from an expert.
Vicky: This one I’ll answer because it really bothers me. This company that’s doing that, some of our owners have actually done that. (?: Oh yes, many people are.) And they’re finding out that after they pay the $2,900 they still own their timeshare. So if you’re going to do that, please be very very careful. Check this out. They don’t actually have you sign a deed, deeding your property to them, so a lot our owners are paying that fee and they still own their timeshare. So please be very careful.
?: We had some people that did and one person had three timeshares and he sold them all to him, at a reduced rate, first one big cost then it worked down of course. But many people are, and I guess, my wife wanted to and I guess I’m almost willing to give my timeshare away like the other lady that was just here rather than costing me $3000. The only advantage to the $3000 is I can write it off on my taxes later on plus the $5000 I paid for the unit in the first place. Is anyone else having any problems with getting rid of their timeshares?
Vicky: It’s not true that you can write that off. Just be careful of what they tell you because they will tell you a lot of things that aren’t true. Always talk to a tax advisor. Don’t take the information they give you as the truth. They will tell you (?: Well then you can look at any person and say what they’re saying is not necessarily the truth.) That’s why, check it out. Lot of times they would send things out saying they’ll buy them from you and they’ll make you have an appraisal. You’ll get the appraisal done and they will never take it from you. So just be very careful with these resale companies. A lot of our owners have been taken by them and I’ve been here 17 years this year and I’ve heard every story there is, so just please be careful.
?: Does the board have a policy of helping owners get rid of their timeshares; does the board accept timeshares? Do they buy them or accept them?
Joe: No, the board presently does not, but as I said next month with the new board seated we’ll be discussing now to do that because many of you have brought this up. So watch the newsletter. It is something we’re going to be talking about. I can’t speak for the board now because it is on the agenda, we will talk about it, but something should be forth coming on what the policy is.
?: You said you’re going to have communications from the board shortly after our meeting here.
Joe: We have a meeting scheduled in May because we won’t know until after the meeting who was elected and we count the ballots. The next board meeting will be in May so next month and then after that the newsletter will go out.
?: No I’m not concerned about who’s on the board, I did vote for three, but my question are the questions we are asking today are they going to be addressed in your newsletter.
Joe: Well they will be addressed at the next board meeting and once the board has acted or not acted and taken a position, then they will be addressed after and we can get that information out in the newsletter after the board has had a chance to meet. (?: You will be answering the questions that are being asked from the floor on the next communication letter you send out or email or internet?) I can’t guarantee if we communicate before the next board meeting that’ll be there but after the next board meeting, the next communication that comes out we will share this information. I don’t know that it will be the next one because there may be one prior to our board meeting, but as soon as the board meeting is over the next communication will address the concerns, yes. (?: The questions that are being asked at the floor?) Correct (?: Okay)
?: Will there be a maintenance increase?
? (Someone from the board?) I’m going to retract that, sorry Joe. But the next board meeting is the 2nd week in May. We don’t know who those members are yet and at that board meeting then maybe we’ll set up committees to look into the questions that are being brought up today. So I don’t know what the time schedule is of the newsletters so we can’t say when it will be communicated but as timely as possible, but we have to leave it up to those new board members. Is that better? Sorry, it’s not an answer, but I don’t want to set you up and say that those board members can get you an answer in that next newsletter when they’ve only had one meeting. I don’t want to put those new board members at that kind of risk. We will be discussing them, we’ll set up committees to discuss the items, I’m making notes of every one of these items.
?: Is it possible for the ownership members to get the board minutes?
Vicky: They’ll be added to the website just like the newsletters are now added on the website, the board minutes will also be put on there. (?: They will be on the internet.) Also the minutes from this meeting will be on the Fox Hills website.
Joe: And you asked about the dues increase? There is no dues increase. We have, it’s been 7 or 6 years or something we didn’t contemplate one or discuss it. Dave, one of your other board members, would like to make a comment.
Dave: On getting rid of your timeshares, there’s several companies out there will say we’ll sell your timeshare and they’ll say it’s worth $8000 and you’ll say oh boy I only paid $5000. (?: And charge you $400 like they did me, yes.) Correct. They’ll just take and take your money and say they’ll put it on the market and they’ll sell it for you. (?: It’s a scam.) They say they’ll list it ‘til they sell it, but they don’t even try, so be aware of these listing companies out there.
?: Don’t call anybody in Florida because if you do they will guarantee they will sell it, but then all of a sudden the telephone numbers disappear. And I’m standing and saying I did that, and I would bet there are many, many people here would raise their hand and say they did it too.
Joe: We hear that and sympathize for people who want to get rid of them and that’s why the board is going to address it, but we hear those stories all the time from people like yourself who gave somebody $400 or $500 and the place disappeared or closed up and that’s why, we’re not saying if you check it out not to do anything. We’re just saying to be careful because probably for every legitimate company out there there’s a lot of scams out there.
?: And that’s why I was referring to the possibility of the board helping the ownership. I said I’m going to give it way, some people right here said let me have it. Could that be addressed in your communication to allow people, other owners who use it correctly, or want it for someone else, to be able to get it from another owner and helping the owners because we are basically all in partnership.
Joe: Well that is, the woman earlier asked if she could put that in the newsletter now, an advertisement. Vicky just told me there’s a classified section on the website so if you’d like to put your unit on there or anything on there, email Vicky and she’s in the credit department, call her, email her, and she can help you get that in the newsletter.
?: I think several bulletins or communications ago we had people listed and they were willing to sell their timeshare for whatever it was, $1000 or whatever it was, and I called and it’s not going to be put in the communication anymore.
Joe: The communication is now on the website and it will be there.
?: I would ask a question, and maybe it’s technical. How many timeshare people were taken to court for non-payment last year? Someone has to know.
Joe: I just asked her. Fifty she’s guesstimating.
?: 50? Okay Then whatever they decided they decided.
Joe: Yes, sometimes we get what we consider fair relief from the court system, sometimes we feel that we don’t get fair relief but it is what it is. The judge makes the decision so. (?: Someone else?) Thank you sir. Yes sir?
?: Did golf course have anything to do with the expenses and stuff that we have here?
Joe: They do not, it’s totally separate.
?: Are they still with us; is it a separate .
Joe: The timeshare, the home owners association you all own a week or some of you multiple weeks in the timeshares over there. Your dues go to maintain those grounds, those buildings, the swimming pool building over there and that’s what your dues and stuff go to pay those property taxes and that insurance. The hotel, the conference center you’re in now, and the golf course is a separate entity and you get reduced rates in those entities, but no none of your money goes to fund them or subsidize them. I should clarify that though. I believe there is a (discussion in background) there is a ? board and the owners in this group about five years ago voted to contribute, I think it’s $10,000 a year or something to, like when we bring in the fireworks in on New Year’s Eve and bands and the ownership said we wanted more entertainment then what’s going on so that’s the only thing that is subsidized. Everything else from your dues strictly goes to maintain those buildings and those grounds. They tell me that my microphone is cutting in and out, so if we have no other questions should we get on to the beverages and to the food? Do we have a motion to adjourn? Oh wait, wait. John tells me has to do something yet.
John: There are a couple of things. Just make sure everybody votes if you haven’t and then next year’s meeting, it’s on your agenda, April 17, 2010. And then now we need a motion to adjourn.
?: Someone made a motion.
John: All in favor, or first a 2nd. All in favor? All opposed? We need a name who said it. Just come on up here. Thank You
Fox Hills Resort
Owners Association Meeting
April 2008
Meeting Minutes
John Holzschuh: Good afternoon again, welcome, I would like to call the annual Fox Hills Owner Association meeting to order. I’m John Holzschuh, Vice President of the Resort and current president of the association. I would like to cover a couple things before we go any further. Everyone should have handouts or have access to handouts. On them we’ll have budgets and agenda. One other issue we should cover before we go any farther. We have a quorum to run this meeting and the board and myself agree that we do. The second thing, that by the rights and bylaws we had to inform you there would be a meeting this year, of which we did last year in the newsletter and then last year at the meeting. So, with that in mind, I would like to go down the rest of the agenda. I’d like to make some introductions here shortly, some announcements, some 2007 improvements and 2008 improvements, and Joe, a member of the management company, will talk about the P & L and budget for 2008, then we’ll do a question and answer session and a normal adjourn. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce the rest of the board, and the other folks up here. Dave Patoka, Ann Francis, Joe Jacobson, Vicky Stangel, Mike Mlezvia, and Andy Farrah. With that done, I’d like to make a few announcements. There have been some issues, some customer service issues we’ve had to deal with and we believe we have them under control. We’re ordering a new phone system for the resort and the association . . . folks have experience. The second thing we’ve had some software issues and we believe we’ve corrected those problems. We also have two additional employees working down at the rec center for Vicky. One other thing, parking at the rec center. In order to be safe, there’s going to be some additional marking or labeling of where to park, but there’s a lot of close parking right in front of the rec center. We usually have that somewhat partitioned off with logs, but you’re kind of blocking the rec center and it’s really not safe, especially with the little children, so be very careful when you’re down there. There are appropriate parking spaces and we’re going to work hard to make sure that all works well. One other issue, we are now looking at, have been working on Focus on Energy regarding energy costs. We are in the process of putting in 32 electric fireplaces and removing the old inserts you had in there in eight buildings we have half of them done. The purpose of this is to be the most energy efficient we can be and control our costs. We’re looking at dealing with Focus on Energy for a number of energy issues. Anywhere from pool covers to you name it so we can control the expense. Another issue we’ve had is pool passes. Some people have talked about what is the current policy. For every membership card you have you’re allowed one guest. The board has discussed it and we want to keep it that way. This does not apply to anybody here who’s on vacation and it does not apply if you’re calling in for a birthday party or any of those things you talk to Alissa Repinski about. This is just for daily walk on, transient kind of folks that come to use the facilities. If you have any questions about this, you can talk to us either after the meeting or anyone of us or board members or the management company would be glad to talk about it. One other thing we’re doing is villa 12, we’re doing handicap access to units A & B. The main focus will be the main entrances obviously and the bathrooms, so we really want to get that done. We’ve had some owners talk to us about that who have some handicap issues and we intend to complete that this year. Also, next year you’ll be getting a newsletter talking about voting for officers and with that I’d like to turn the meeting over to Andy, he has something to say.
Andy Farrah: Under election and term of officers I want to make a motion as John is going to read it so if you’d go ahead and read it’.
John Holzschuh: Thank you . . . Based on the by-laws, we the board are recommending to the ownership that the last year’s vote of the three current board members, by the ownership, does comply with section 43a2 on page 38 of the by-laws, meaning your vote satisfies the election of these owner representative so I would ask for any discussion on this issue right now, but the board recommends that we accept it.
? Basically I want to thank everybody for electing me last year but in reading the election term of records I’m off the board today because it says we were elected for a one year term so it should have read two year term, so that’s what we need to adjust. It’s just a formality and actually I noticed it when I was reading it. So then next year there will be an election for two more. Then there will be every year an election for directors. That’s the way it should work. OK. So there’s just a misprint in your books, it says one year, and the three of us you elected last year should be on the board at this meeting. Any other discussion . . .
? Is this the first time that this came up, wasn’t that always in there, for one year term.
John Holzschuh: Well, because of the transition, and maybe Joe would want to talk a little bit about that you know you had the transition last year away from . . ?
Joe Jacobson: One thing if people don’t go to the microphone to ask your question, I know it’s a pain, but then you won’t get you comments in the minutes and we’ll end up with dead spots in the minutes. That’s the only reason we ask you to go to the microphones even if you have a powerful voice is you won’t be in the minutes. If you all remember there’s triggering events that would turn control of the association from the developer to you the owners. That trigger happened last October after we did the annual meeting. Previously all board members were elected for two year terms. We elected the three board members last year. I instructed Vicky to have three ballots put out knowing this triggering event was coming. In the disclosure book, it says after this event happens that you the owners take over control of the board, it says three members should be elected to a one year term. I missed that. It should have been a two year. And quite honestly, the way it’s written in there, if we would have done three to a one year term and two the next year to a two year term, all five would be getting done at the same time, if we follow that. Not a good situation. You want some continuity in your board members now that you have all five. So the five of us sat down there, actually the six of us because I’m not a board member, for the last hour trying to figure out the easiest way to remedy this and what the board came up with is instead of the three being on a one year term, if we made this a two year term from today we elect two more next year you have all five of your board members and they’re on alternate terms. So, the way it’s written they would have come up at the same time. We would have done an election again but then we would have done an election in two years for all five of them and it didn’t seem to make any sense to us, so that’s what this is all about. We do have it up here if anybody cares to look at it afterward. It’s just simply trying to fix that. So if there’s any further discussion go to a microphone and otherwise if someone would stand up and make a second to that motion at a microphone.
? I second it.
John Holzschuh: Thank you. Yes we need a vote, so one per unit all in favor?
Aye
John Holzschuh: Any opposed?
Silence
John Holzschuh: Motion carried. Thank you. (Pause)
2007 improvements we reroofed three villas and one golf villa (Pause – owner comment “talk louder, we can’t hear you”.) Villa 2, Villa 20, Villa 12 & Golf Villa 2. Installed an automatic bromine feeder in the whirlpool; repainted golf villas 2, 3, 4 & 5; installed fascia in condos 1, 5, 6, 7, 14 & 15; replaced p-tech units in 10 of the units; DVDs in all 104 areas; 10 new dishwashers; dining room chairs in presidential units 2b, 3b, 20b & 36 (?); ceiling fans are about half way complete putting fans in, replacing the old chandeliers; it’s a light fan & fan, I think a lot of you have seen some of them, we started a year ago on them and we should be finished very shortly with all of them. Any comments about that? (None)
2008 Capital – We are once again working with Focus on Energy and replacing / putting in 32 fireplaces, we have 16 of them in. We are going to go to a card system instead of keys, the keys will be gone within about a month, so you’ll be getting cards when you check in and will be like a regular resort so to speak, you’ll be finished with keys. Water heaters we’re looking to turn over about four of them; painting we’re going to do three buildings again; the dehumidification system in the rec center we want to move on that at the end of the year and update that; we’ll continue to put in dishwashers, we’ll put ten more in and we’re going to do a number of mattresses and we’re targeting two to three additional roofs to do, and we want to replace pool covers and put in a new robot to clean the pool. And once again the pool covers are Focus on Energy savings, because when you get that on you save a lot, a lot of energy. Then we have a couple other things, some valve work, etc. and there’s another issue we’re going to be changing some of the other covers and things to comply with some OSHA standards we have to meet in 2008. Ok, any questions about any of the expenditures? Yes sir.
Owner ? – With this Focus on Energy, my question is, with the water heaters that are being replaced now I believe that’s natural gas, am I correct?
John Holzschuh – Some are electric, there are a few gas ones but they aren’t natural gas and we are looking at that with WPS.
Owner ? Continued – OK so that’s being addressed with Focus on Energy. And then has the on-demand water heaters been looked into vs. the central?
John Holzschuh – You’re talking right out of our book, we’re definitely looking at that also.
Owner ? Continued – OK
John Holzschuh – That’s why we really don’t have, we’re in the process of that right now, we’re working with WPS, Mike Vileskie , and we’re working with a gentleman, Tony, I can’t remember his last name, from Focus and then we’re going to walk around and exactly measure off with these folks how we bring the pipe in and take a look at that and then how would we plug the meters in, and we want to get the best energy efficient piece of equipment we can possibly get in here.
Owner ? Continued – And so to date, what has been the efficiency looking as far as the on-demand water heaters vs. the central?
John Holzschuh – Joe is in contact with Design Air and he’ll talk about that.
Joe Jacobson – John and the staff here have been working with WPS and the people from Focus on Energy. I used to be a sheet metal worker, so I have a little background as a heating contractor, I have an engineer coming out from Design Air in Kimberly next week who walked the property with me, not that I don’t think that WPS knows what they’re doing, but I figure the more ideas we can get on this the better. We’re going to be looking at on-demand as you say; I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the U.S. is basically the only place in the world they use water heaters with tanks. Everybody else uses on-demand, so you only heat the water when you turn the hot water faucet on. Nobody else heats it 24 / 7, 365 days of the year in these tanks. They do cost a little bit more so we’re going to have to do that analysis with the engineers and with WPS & Focus on Energy and look at what makes the most sense. I’m assuming the on-demand will. Currently, I think all of your villas except for four of them are heating the hot water with electric, which is not the most effective way. Twenty years ago when they were built it was. WPS is also working and looking at what it takes to bring the natural gas in to each of these villas. We should have that price in a week or so. So the units we put the fireplace inserts in, the old fireplaces had eight inch open vent, basically all the time an eight inch hole out the wall in each unit. They’re coming in doing a blower test on those units vs. units that have not been changed. That’ll tell us how much we saved by that and may also qualify us for, they typically do not give you any money if you switch to an electrical appliance, but in this case, if it’s savings, they will, but they need to do the blower test and see the actual savings. Blower test will also tell if we have leaky windows, if we need to caulk anywhere, seal in the attic. Those are all the kinds of things you can do fairly reasonably to save energy and as we all know at home I don’t see it getting cheaper in the foreseeable future until they figure out an alternate source and that may not happen in our lifetime, so we need to figure out ways to use less.
Owner ? Continued – Thank you, and in addition, I’d like to know if you’ve had any estimates on the time of length of the payoff on the potential of this changeover to the on-demands.
Joe Jacobson – Well that will be part of the whole thing we’ll have to analyze once they look at it, we’ll have to prepare that and look at that and make the prudent choice at that time.
Owner ? Continued – And then how is the channel of our knowledge of that survey going to be to us?
Joe Jacobson – We as the management company bring that information to the board of directors you elected and they give me direction. I don’t spend your money without your board of directors approving it on capital projects.
Owner ? Continued – Correct. And then is there a web page or something where we can find these up-to-date pieces of information?
Joe Jacobson – There presently isn’t, but that isn’t a bad idea. The owner’s association currently does not have a web page, to my knowledge. Correct? They are working on it Vicky says.
Owner ? – There’s a lot of roof space on all the villas, are you guys considering solar power?
Joe Jacobson – Well that’s interesting. When I was talking to the engineer yesterday at Design Air he said they just looked at a brand new line of solar that is much more efficient and reasonably priced then what the old units were. They just looked at it, but it’s one of the things he wants to talk to me about when he comes out here next week, so we’ll turn over any stone.
Owner ? - I got a question about the key cards. I work in a company where their identification badges are also the timecards. Is that going to be where your association cards are going to open the villas?
Joe Jacobson – No, they’ll be coded to open the villas when you check in, just like in a hotel because they’re done for a certain stay if you’re going to be here for a weekend or for a whole week, they expire then at that time so nobody can reenter or do anything. That’s why they are coded like that because you don’t want anybody, that’s one of the issues quite honestly when we bring the insurance companies out here each year to quote our insurance what they don’t like about the old metal keys, if someone leaves with one in their pocket we cut a new one so the next guest can have one, but how many of those old ones are out there floating around.
Owner ? – That wasn’t my question.
Joe Jacobson – Yeah, these expire, you know, if you check in today and you’re leaving tomorrow, it will get you in there until tomorrow at 11:00 and then the thing doesn’t work anymore. We have to recode it for the next guest.
Owner ? – Sorry sir, but that was not my question. My question is talking about cards. Are you going to have to go up to the counter to get a card like you get a key, or are you going to be able to use your identification association card, which is going to by a computer, say you got this week for that time then the computer . .
Joe Jacobson – Your ownership card would still, number one I don’t know what the ownership card looks like, so but it would have to have a magnetic strip and it would still have to be run through the programmer to program it to do that so you do have to go to the check in counter anyway so your answer is no, you’ll get a card at check in because it has to be programmed at that point.
Owner ? – Thank You
Joe Jacobson – If you’re asking about, OK, OK, that’s fine . .
Owner ? – My question is, are you planning on upgrading your television sets to high definition, flat panel LCD? (Background laughter.) John Holzschuh responded, owner comments ‘can’t hear’.
Joe Jacobson – John said that every new television set we have bought, that has been done with as we replaced them. If you’ve been watching the cable commercials just recently, we do have cable out here so the tv sets will all work. Cable is now advertising every television will work no matter how old it is. But we aren’t silly, so as we replace them we are replacing them with the newer style flat panels and so forth. We’re also wise with your money; we’re not throwing away working televisions that still do the job for us. OK?
Owner ? - OK, thank you.
Joe Jacobson – As long as, one more question, then we’ll go to the financials after this.
Owner ? – There’s a lot of resorts we’ve been to know they’re putting in safes in all the units, have you guys considered that?
Joe Jacobson – Not to my knowledge, but it’s something we can take note of and talk about at our next board meeting for some place to spend the money. (Some laughter.) If people want them, let your board members know and make some recommendations and we entertain any ideas people have.
Owner ? – I’ve been in every meeting since I’ve been an owner, and about three years ago you told us you were going to put hairdryers into each unit at a cost of $15 - $18 a piece and I haven’t seen one yet. In fact, when I came the next two years, I never brought my hairdryer because they were supposed to be here.
Joe Jacobson – Vicky is saying we have ones you can use, but I do think I do remember it was on the list of things to get done at that time. I don’t know why it wasn’t done, why we didn’t get to that. Is that something, just a show of hands, people want in the units? Hairdryers?
Owner ? – If ? spend the money, I think we should have them.
Joe Jacobson – That is correct that you say that, but we put this list out here and sometimes other things happen that necessitate that, we also don’t have a magic ball, if something breaks that costs a lot of money or there’s a wind storm or something like that and you have to do some repairs we don’t necessarily put the association in a deficit position either. I don’t remember why they weren’t done, but I do believe you are correct they were on the list. Amy?
Owner (Amy) – I just want to say when I stay in a lot of the resorts, they have the hairdryers not in every unit but they have them and you call or when you check in, and say I’d like a hairdryer and they immediately bring them to you. Maybe that would save a little money not having them in every unit but yet having them there available, just a thought.
Joe Jacobson – And we do have that now, but we should maybe have a better, maybe the information should be easier to see in the unit or something. So we do have them. And if you want them in every unit that’s something we clearly can do.
Owner ? – I understand that the timeshares are no longer being marketed and I’m curious as to why the owners were not notified of this decision?
Joe Jacobson – Well the owners association never marketed the timeshares, the developer marketed the timeshares. So we quit selling them, and I think you were made aware of it, we quit selling them a few years ago then we had a company called Roman come in, I introduced them at the meeting a few years ago, they sold them for awhile. They decided that they were getting out of the timeshare selling business. Since the advent of the no call list, it’s become cost prohibitive.
Owner ? – How do we expect to generate income?
Joe Jacobson – You mean for the association?
Owner ? – Well, to maintain the property?
Joe Jacobson – Well, first of all the existing owners are out there, they pay their dues.
Owner ? – That’s my other question; I’m hearing from various sources that there are many owners who are choosing to not pay their dues. Are we expected to absorb those delinquencies?
Joe Jacobson – I’m going to be going over the financials shortly and that’ll be in there.
Owner ? – For the handicap accessible condos, how about putting shower chairs in one of the showers and also hand held shower heads that would be easier for people to take showers.
Joe Jacobson – Are you talking about in the handicap units.
Owner ? – Yes
Joe Jacobson – Yes, we actually brought an architect in to design those so they were done properly and I believe that is the requirement. Yeah, John has a copy of the blueprints and we didn’t just decide to do that. We felt we’d bring a professional in and make sure it was done properly. Yes Mam.
Owner ? – I had a concern about smoking and non smoking units. I thought I had heard at a previous owners meeting that we were going to non smoking units.
Joe Jacobson – I believe what you heard was we cut the number of smoking units, is that correct Vicky? We cut the number down; I don’t think it’s going to be more than the next season where the states going to tell us what to do in that regard anyway.
Owner ? – I have a big concern with that. We were placed in a smoking unit and it was bad, it was very bad and I’m concerned with having any smoking units with the excess cleaning that’s involved and possible damage with burning holes in carpet.
Joe Jacobson – Your recommendation would be that we do not the smoking units.
Owner ? – Right, if people want to smoke they can go outside on a patio or whatever. We’ve been to plenty of other resorts where they are not smoking and they just provide ashtrays for the patios.
Joe Jacobson – Ah, what’s the feeling, one of your board members just asked it would be interesting to see a show of hands so the board had an idea what you feel. How many people would like to see 100% smoke free? (Some laughter.) That looks pretty strong. How many would like to leave it the way it is where there are a few smoking? (Some laughter.) I’m sure your board of directors will take that under advisement. That’s their call.
Joe Jacobson – OK, if you turn to the back page of your financial. There’s a couple of things here, if you look under the 2008 budget numbers, you’ll see under the third line down, late fee income, there’s a zero. Later on if you look where bad debts is it’s down about eight or ten lines you’ll see a zero. That was done at one of our board members suggestion. Really what we did in the late fee income in the association and what we have to right off in bad debt due to a bankruptcy, a death or something that’s uncollectible we never know until the end of the year. We used to basically take a guesstimate every year so what the suggestion from your board was is that we not budget for those because it’s an unknown factor. At the end of the year we have what we have, that’s what we end up with at the end of the year. So I just wanted to make it clear why those are zero. And you’ll see if you look at late fee income 2007 budget and actual income you’ll see why they chose not to budget that. We took a guesstimate based on previous years of $108,000 and more owners paid timely, to get back to that earlier question, we had much less late fees collected last year so that makes a paper difference only in income, the budgeted difference in income. But it makes your income look less, when in reality that was just kind of a number picked based on previous history. So that’s why those two, there’s not a mistake there, we just decided not to budget those. The things that are written in your rider are some, we’ll go through some of those. There’s some differences there and we’ll go through why. I want to start up with on the expense line, well let’s go up to revenue. Can you see your revenue is very close to budget. You can see that your interest income is very close to budget, and then of course your late fee income is down and as I said, late fees, we don’t know if people are going to be early or late so that’s a guesstimate. So revenue is down only in the budget, simply if we worked out an actual cash it was down in that estimate of late fee income. You go to wages & salaries, we are over budget last year in wages, you go over to the right hand column you’ll see in 2008 we are budgeting a substantial decrease. The actual of 2007 is less than 2006, we budgeted a bigger decrease than we got. We thought we would be checking in people down at the rec center by June, we thought the implementation of the new computer system that John spoke about earlier would go easier than it did, we had to move everybody, all 5000 owners, from the old system to the new, check that data. It just didn’t go as smoothly as we thought, so we didn’t get the front desk moved down there until October and didn’t realize all the anticipated savings we thought we would. Even though it was a decrease from 2006. You see we’re budgeting $555,240 this year. First quarter we’re actually $5,000 under budget on our labor for the first quarter, so we should have no problem hitting that budget number and actually exceeding it, and that comes from many of the changes we made. We just took longer to get the changes done last year and I apologize for that, everybody worked hard, but it didn’t go as quickly as we thought. You go down a few more lines, if you go the right where the writing is it says premium increase. There’s two things there, its group health insurance. We did have a big premium increase, we also had more people participating. That’s always, apparently we have to offer it to every employee, you have an employee / spouse that splits up or something and now that spouse normally is covered by their other spouses, whatever reason, besides getting a little older, they need it, it’s out there, they’re offered, we had both more participation and we had an increase in rates. 401k, we had more participation. More people who decided they want to participate in putting some of their money away for retirement so that raised that. And ah . . (End of first side of tape; other side of tape blank.)
(Beginning of second tape; one side of second tape blank.)
Owner ? - . . . have nametags or something on to address them as staff to look a little bit more professional as we’re coming in. And yesterday after we checked into villa 14 we decided to go over and use the pools. On the way over I’m picking up little nails in the driveway on the way over, and I’m thinking, I just drove over these nails? I mean this isn’t making me real happy, so I picked an example of it up and threw the rest in the dumpster and took it in as we went in to go swimming inside and said I found this in the road, thinking maybe someone would go out in check or if we need to sweep or find, I don’t know if it was from doing the soffit (sp?) or what work had been done, but they were little finishing nails. And there wasn’t any addressed or anything applied to it when I told them about these nails, so we decided to go in and go swimming, and I saw they must have been doing some maintenance in the pool area that it looked like it was fresh stained or refinished and some of the metal plating had been repainted, the black looks really nice since we’ve been out here two, three weeks ago, but as we got into the pool, I mean there’s like rust or it’s dirty looking in the pool and the whirlpool. It’s not clean, fresh looking. And the water has been extremely cold so they must have drained or refilled it, you would think the pool should be clean going in. This morning we went over to go swimming, and as we’re getting into the rec center pool, there’s all little hard pieces of plastic broken throughout the pool. Well these are sharp edges, if you’re out there to exercise or walk in the water, you can cut your feet or poke this into your foot. So we picked up more than a half a dozen of these pieces and laid them up on the edge as we’re out walking in the water this morning. But I think we need to be a little more conscious of this rec center and maintenance and our physical appearance out there.
John Holzschuh – Thank you. The nails obviously came, we’ve had people working on the roofs and the fascia, etc. and probably some of the snow and hauling trucks in and out, but that is our problem to get it picked up. As far as the dress code, everybody should be wearing a nametag, and if they aren’t, you need to ask for Vicky Stangel when you’re here and she will address that and we can deal with the dress code that way. As far as the pool, you should have been able to go to the rec center attendant and ask for maintenance and they would have come and cleaned and picked up anything you want. You said you were there this morning? OK thank you, I’ll follow up on it myself.
Joe Jacobson – That brings up one of the earlier questions, that is one of the reasons that they did go to a seminar a couple weeks ago, a gentleman brought up bromine was basically sold to ? industry as something that was going to be way better than chlorine. We don’t feel it does as good a job. Even after you vacuum it and scrub, you need to do a lot of hand scrubbing it gives that dirty look eventhough the water is clean until you physically scrub it off. That’s one of the reasons to go along with the gentleman’s comment earlier, bromine was supposed to be the big new thing that you didn’t need to worry about storage and danger and anything and do the same job. It doesn’t appear that it is doing the same job at all and that is one of the reasons we’re addressing that, to along with gentleman’s question earlier. Yes?
Owner ? – You said you’re getting our cards down at the pool now? Did you do anything, I always brought up, two years ago about you were looking at parking down there, and now you’re going to have more cars coming down there?
Joe Jacobson – There is additional parking added already if you look along the side over there.
Owner ? – Yeah, but you’re going to bring more cars come and get their cards. I talked to your guy cutting grass and he said he don’t why they need all that grass. It would look nice if they would have parking and it would be easier on the snow removal and it would look nice for people to park and the people that are there don’t have to worry about their parking spot.
Joe Jacobson – Well that’s why we did add parking on the side, all the way, we took out a bunch of grass and added parking.
Owner ? – Oh
Joe Jacobson – You go down there and look and then let us know after you look if you still don’t think it’s enough but we added six stalls down there on the side. When you come up along the side, not out front because there’s not much room out in front when you have cars across from you backing out of those villas right at your cars, but if you came out the front door and turned left and take that little path out of the rec center, we added six stalls, they come out almost all the way up to the corner. So take a look at that and let us know if you think that’s enough or not, anybody, not just this gentleman.
Owner ? – Well I was talking with him and the first two you got coming, the first two hotel parking, you got a straight shot, and the guy that does your lawn and stuff, he said he don’t understand why they got to have these, somewhere out there you got a fire hydrant, yes, you got to have so much around. You put a tree there and it would be so much simpler to have it nice and straight as far as plowing snow, make it look nice, you can park more cars right in front of there.
Joe Jacobson – So you’re advocating like over towards where the play area is we add another parking lot there.
Owner ? – Well on that side of the pool where you go into the entrance. If you had a straight shot it would be easier for plowing snow, and you’re cutting grass all the time there, that would be a lot less grass cutting and trimming there.
Joe Jacobson – Well and you also have the expense of putting in the parking lot too, and that’s not free, but we definitely will look at that.
Owner ? – Because people are coming, the people from the highway want to come down here and park and you’re going to have more cars. It was brought up two years ago I know we mentioned it.
Joe Jacobson – Yeah, and we did add some parking but if it’s not enough we can definitely look at that. I do know that is an issue when you stay out in the golf villas that you can’t walk to the pool. (Pause) Oh, and the other thing, mam, before, the plastic you found in the pool, that shouldn’t have happened, but throwing a rope out there that cleans it, I use one at home, hopefully that would solve that problem. It should have been vacuumed anyway, John will get to the bottom of that, but it’s vacuumed everyday so I don’t quite understand what happened there. Go ahead sir.
Owner ? – I don’t want to refute what anyone says, but I think you’re also entitled to hear something good about your organization. I only live fairly close here and my family and I take advantage of the health facilities and we play some golf when our sons from out of state are here and we get involved with a number of the wedding receptions, and some of my out-of-state friends really comment on how well they do these wedding receptions. They handled it quite well. I think if you on occasion come to a (applause) . . . I think if you come to some of their specials, I think you’ll be treated quite well and you know it’s a small town, we’re not glitzy, but they do a fine job, so I think you’re entitled to hear a couple of good points too. (Applause)
Joe Jacobson – Thank you, not for me, but for the staff out here because they’re the ones that do all that. To go along with that, we did do over twice the weddings in 2007 then in 2006, we’ll be doing even more this year, and do more of this type of business with doing what this gentleman just said. You have to do a good job, people have to be well taken care of. You look where we used to sell timeshare, you see the chapel. A lot of good things taking place. A lot of great things taking place, so thank you, very much for the comment. I like to hear both the positive and the negative. We can’t get any better if we don’t hear the negative, but it sure is nice to hear the positive once in a while. Mam?
Owner ? – We were a little disappointed last night that you didn’t have the Wine & Cheese reception. We always enjoyed that as a way to meet other timeshare owners and RCI members and we wondered if you are going to have that again or if not, if you would consider designating a room where RCI owners and members could meet?
Joe Jacobson – Ah, I’ll take the flack for this one. The board basically looked at the cost and asked the people who worked it for the resort about the number of attendees and just felt for the limited participation, but it’s your dollars you the owners so if you want to give them a different message, if you want to give them the message you’d like to see it, you’re welcome to that. That’s why the decision was made by your board so again.
Owner ? – It was never large, but I think the people who attended really enjoyed it.
Joe Jacobson – Let me ask this question to the board. If the resort put it on and there was a small fee to attend just to cover the cost would you be interested in that or not?
Board ? – Sure
Joe Jacobson – OK
Owner ? – I have another question. I understand we have a new person in the timeshare office named Crystal, is she here today?
Joe Jacobson – No she is not, they said she could not arrange babysitting.
Owner ? – You have a lot of grandmas here. (Laughter)
Joe Jacobson – Relayed a comment from an owner who couldn’t be heard. Owner commented he likes where the restaurant has been moved to. Joe: I will have to agree. We got sold that whole idea of moving the restaurant down below the bar a number of years ago by the guys who were managing for us at that time, but it’s still our decision. We have to approve it. They had a really good concept, it just didn’t work out very well. I was an advocate shortly after of moving back, unfortunately we had to wait until certain bookings for those rooms that are booked sometimes two years out played out, but we quit taking bookings and got it all switched around and moved back and I think it works much nicer that way now. I think it works out nice for everybody, but again, feel free to give us your comments. That’s how we make this place better. You know, customer comments. Thank You. Mam?
Owner ? – I just wanted to say we did try out the Willow restaurant Friday night and we had excellent service and superb food there. It’s been a very nice addition to come out here for it and we also missed having the get together, the reception, for the wine & cheese and I think it is a good idea to have something like that or some activity especially on this weekend when a lot of the owners are out here, even if it’s just an informal get together in the rec center or something. I don’t know if it was the expense of having the three or four bartenders set up out in the hall and having to use space out here that added to the cost, I mean it’s something that could be set up as the other lady had suggested, in one of the rooms or rec center as a help yourself or get together to. But we were a little disappointed just walking in that there wasn’t anything for a packet when we checked in this weekend, saying anything for a get together for the owners. It’s something you look forward to meet everybody. It might only be the one time of the year you see some people out here and it’s nice to keep up the camaraderie and it gets people coming back out or meeting or planning to do things.
Joe Jacobson – So you’re suggesting if we just designated a place to have a meeting and didn’t go through all the expense of staffing it as fully, but gave you all a place to meet and let you know where it was, that that would suffice?
Owner ? – Yeah, I think it’s just matter of having a designated time or location where you can join up or meet each other to see who’s out here for the weekend when we come out for the meeting.
Joe Jacobson – OK. The board is listening, I’m sure they’ll take that under advisement. Yes sir.
Owner ? – Yes, back on this wine & cheese. (Laughter)
Joe Jacobson – Seems to be the big topic today.
Owner ? – Yes it is because it’s very important to lots of people here. You have no problem spending all kinds of money for a couple handicapped people, we weren’t asked about that. (Groans from the owners.)
Joe Jacobson – That’s a legal issue, the association could get sued over that under Americans With Disabilities Act, but go ahead, go ahead.
Owner ? – I don’t know how much it cost, but you’re talking pennies per owner for wine & cheese and everybody enjoys themselves. That’s one of the reasons I come here for this.
Joe Jacobson – OK, and the reason I can tell you, I was sitting in the meeting when the board decided not to do that, they heard how many people attended and every owner pays. And you’re right it might only be pennies for every owner, but they felt at that time that with the small amounts of participation it wasn’t cost effective. Why don’t we do a show of hands here, just like we did before? How many people want to continue the wine & cheese on Friday nights if they allow us to do that? (Pause for show of hands.) OK. And how many think we should not do it and just give them an area to meet and get together? (Pause for show of hands.) Would it be fair to say as a board that we try to set some place up for people to get together and do something, have some type of event on the Friday night? All right. Yes sir?
Owner ? – Would you take a show of hands how many people were here last evening?
Joe Jacobson – How many people were here last evening? (Pause for show of hands.) We can take more questions or at any point we can take a motion to adjourn too.
Owner ? – I’ll be quick again. I think was it in the Fox Tails, but as far as the contact information for the board members, is it in the Fox Tails or how do we, email addresses?
Joe Jacobson – We’ll put it on the web page and in the Fox Tails.
Owner ? – OK And the web page address is?
Joe Jacobson – It’s not quite up yet. If you want their contact information get it up here, it will be in the next newsletter and also in that next newsletter will be the website when it’s up. Should be up shortly. Yes sir?
Owner ? – I have two questions. We used to have an RCI rep, would come to all the meetings. Is it possible to get one here next year?
Joe Jacobson – We’d get one here every year if they would come. Sometimes they have them available and sometimes not. They’re like, it seems like every other business, our rep keeps getting switched and they seem give them larger and larger territories. We always like it when they come to because if people have RCI questions, we’re really not qualified to answer most of those. We do the best we can, but we’re not experts on it.
Owner ? – Right, and that’s why I’d like to have someone here too. My other question is I’d like to meet with John after the meeting. I can tell him how to do the wine and cheese for free. (Applause from owners.)
Joe Jacobson – Well that’s good. I told you the best ideas come from out there. Free. There’s no better than free.
Owner ? – There was an introduction in the beginning of the meeting from John, but I heard a lot about Vicky. Like what does Vicky do, what does each of the board members do, what are there positions and titles?
Joe Jacobson – John works here full time. He manages the property overall. He works for me as the management company of your association, he also works for me as the vice president of the whole property, so he oversees this whole property. Ann Francis is an accountant who works for me. She’s an owner out here at Fox Hills. She also is on your board of directors, she does your accounting, she’s a CPA. You remember a number of years ago we centralized accounting back in our office in Menasha where we do several of our businesses. Some of you with longer memories, we cut some wages out here, cut some accounting staff, not just for the association but for the resort as well, so that’s Ann right there. Vicky is down on the end here. Vicky is operations manager down at the rec center. And that encompasses a lot of things. We consolidated, you remember when Lisa Black was up here, as your owners rep. The check in, check out and owners rep have all been consolidated down there, so Vicky is in charge of everything day to day for the association, under John, but she’s down there day to day. Every day down at the rec center running things down there. She takes care of the owners rep questions, or her staff, as well as the check in and check out. The other gentlemen here, the three gentlemen on either side of me that are seated don’t work here. They’re the board members you elected last year and continue to serve you, they’re your board of directors from you the owners but both Vicky and Ann are owners as well. Ann’s not employed here but she works for me. Vicky is employed here, but she is an owner as well and they each own units just like you do. And of course the other three have to own units to be elected to the board members. The other two were appointed by me when we still appointed members before you took over last October so next year there’ll be an election where you elect all five, two more board members so you have all five of them.
John Holzschuh – Are you looking for more personal information, do you want them to introduce themselves and talk a little bit? Otherwise you can meet with them after, they would be glad to.
Owner ? – No, I was just considering what the balance is between the management and the owners, and it looks like there’s three to four.
John Holzschuh – Three to two.
Owner ? - I mean because everyone is working for Joe.
John Holzschuh – It will be five to zero. All for you.
Joe Jacobson – Personally right now the board is comprised of five people. The board tells me what to do. You hired me as your management company and I get my orders from them. For years and years, and a lot of you know this because you’ve talked to me, the developer controlled the board of directors. He got appoint three, you got to elect two. There was triggering things, many different things if you read your bylaws in your disclosure book that would have triggered us turning over control of the association. That happened last October, actually that’s why I had three elected last year instead of two, knowing that was going to happen. Since October you’ve had three board members to the developer two, but both of the board members that are left are owners out here, and next year you’ll elect two more, so if they want to run and you want to elect them, or whoever else wants to run, but for right now it’s a three to two, I don’t get to vote in any meetings. I get to say what I think would work for your association and help make recommendations based on John & I talking with Focus on Energy, when I bring out this engineer I’ll bring data with me and maybe bring the engineer to a meeting. I’ll make recommendations based on the work I do, but then they tell me what to do. Their really the bosses.
Owner ? – Three of them do collect their wage from you.
Joe Jacobson – No, two.
Owner ? – John?
Joe Jacobson – No, John’s not on the board. Not anymore. He was your president until; at this meeting, if you read your disclosure book, its official that you took over, the triggering event was last October at this meeting. I elected three early because I didn’t want to hear about it and besides it was fair anyway. I mean it was partially, it was going to happen last fall, so I took one of my people off last October when that happened, eventhough I didn’t need to yet, and seated three of your board members. That’s why we elected three last year. So John is the Vice President of the whole resort, works for me, he’s no longer president of the association, the boards going to have to elect a new one after today, the board will have to do that. So we have Dave, Mike & Andy are all members you elected last year. Ann and Vicky are left from when I appointed them, but they also are owners and next year we need two people to run for elections, so think about that. It will come out in the Fox Tails like always, asking for people to run. So, are they employed for us, yes, but they also are owners and you have a three to two majority. That’s your question, there’s three non-employees vs. two employees on the board right now, so you have an absolute majority. There’s a couple old board members in the crowd, even when it was three to two; Amy I saw back there, a few other people I’m sure that were on the board, there’s never ever, ever been a vote out here, since I’ve been involved, can’t say what happened when Ron Likus was here and up until when Don Miller was here, but since we took over in 1998 or 1999, we never had a vote that wasn’t five O, we’ve never rammed anything down anybody’s throat, it’s kind of counter productive. If we don’t all work together we don’t get anywhere. There was a number of years ago, I see some of you nodding your heads, some of you didn’t know if your timeshare would even be here by this time. It took a lot of hard work by all of us to get this done and we all have to work together. So, I don’t anticipate that changing whether it’s three to two, or two to three or all five that are owner elected, it really doesn’t matter, I’m hired as a management company as well, I used to be the developer and hired as the management company, I could have always been fired by the management company because that was what your board of directors did. And we all have to work together and continue to work together, so thank you. And again, anytime somebody wants to make a motion to adjourn so we can start to have a beverage and eat. (Laughter)
John Holzschuh – We have to do one thing first. First of all, if you take a look, we have next year’s meeting is April 18, 2009, and you’ll get information in the letter also regarding this. And then, with that said, I need to make a motion to adjourn the meeting.
? – I so move.
John Holzschuh – Second? Names? And we need to go to the mic.
Don Klinger –
Bob Bruekie – I make a motion to adjourn at this time.
John Holzschuh – Thank you. OK. So moved. All in favor
Owners – Aye
John Holzschuh – Opposed? Thank You
FOX HILLS OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION
ANNUAL MEETING
April 21, 2007
MR. HOLZSCHUH: I’d like to call this meeting to order.
Everybody should have handouts containing budgets, etc. One other thing I’d like to cover is that we need to inform you that we have a quorum to run this meeting, and the Board and myself believes that we do. The second thing is that by the rights and by-laws we had to inform you about this. We did that last year at last year’s meeting plus we did it in a newsletter.
So with that in mind, I’d like to cover the rest of the agenda. We’re going to do some introductions here shortly, I’m going to make some announcements, and talk about activities, ’06 and ’07 improvements, ’07 P&L and budget, and then we’ll do our question and answer session and a meeting summary. During the questions and answer session, if anyone has questions, please come to any of the mics that are out there and ask your questions like we normally do.
So with that in mind, I’d like to make some introductions. On the board, Michael Mlezvia, Amy MacMillin, Vicky Stangel, Ann Frances, and Joe is the developer – Joe Jacobson – and myself, obviously.
Announcements – one of the things I’d like to talk about is voting. We have cards out and you’ve been mailed cards with the names of the people who are running for Board seats. Mike Mlezvia is again, Amy is not, David Patoka, Jerry Kabat and Andrew Farah, so you know who they are. As we normally do, we’ll have to total up all the votes. You have an opportunity to vote yet at this meeting.
One other thing I’d like to talk about, and I think most of you know it, we’re having an owner rep change. Lisa Black is no longer going to be here. She’s venturing on to somewhere else. In her place, Rebecca Mueller, sitting right next to her, will be replacing her, and Vicky Stangel. That’s the hand you’re dealt.
Other managers we have here are Tina Nichols, she’s our catering manager, and Alissa Repinski, our activities director, whom I believe most of you also know.
A couple of things – we’re going to try once again to be as efficient as we can be because obviously we are set up for a wedding here. One of our employees is getting married today, and we’d really like to make sure we’re organized for that.
The reception we’re going to do in the Crystal Room and if anybody doesn’t – I’m assuming everybody knows where that is right by the bar, and we just did some changes in there with carpeting, etc., etc., and we hope you like it. There’s a couple other changes that I’d like to mention that we have done here. We have a new wedding chapel and if you have any questions about that, Tina or Sarah would be happy to answer them for you, but we are very proud of those improvements.
Some other things I’d like to talk about in regard to activities. Alissa has charted some different ground for this year. We’re going to be doing some wine tours locally, some cave tours in Maribel, and we’re doing several golf clinics - we have a new golf pro, Aaron Kabat, who is very, very good - and cookouts for owners once a week, and we’re also going to do introduction to tennis lessons, and also Jewelry Classes by Carissa. So we’re trying to change things up and trying to approach different venues for you.
So with that in mind, I would like to talk about the ’06 and ’07 improvements. Major renovations for ’06 were we re-roofed two buildings – two villas – and repainted the pool deck surface, which we do annually now, and we got two additional washer/dryers – stackables – some oak stairwell spindles in Golf Villa 1, slabbed a number of lock-off doors. We did presidential screens, and you don’t have this listed on yours, but we did 19-20 dishwashers replaced and carpeting completely in Villas 1 and 10, and the entrance ways to three other villas. We are going to be talking about doing more of those improvements in ’07. So if you flip your sheet over, we’ll talk a little bit about what we want to do this year.
We’re going to re-roof three more villas. We’re also going to look at getting the Rec Center dehumidifier so we can do a little ventilation in there, or improve that. We’re going to get an automatic bromine feeder for the pool. We’re looking at repainting the exteriors of four villas, and we’re also going to install fascia on the exterior windows and doors of four more villas; P-Tec units, those are the heating units, for six villas; stackable washer and dryers, once again, two more; slab entrances to the doors, we’d like to do four more; mattresses for Golf Villas 4 & 5, there’s going to be 34 of those; new entrance and hallway carpet for Villas 14 and 20; and new barstools in 32 units. New dishwashers, 36 of them, in villas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15 and dining chairs in the presidential units 2B, 3B, 20B – 36 of them – and we’d like to finish off the old chandeliers with fans, and that’s a nice touch, we hope, so should improve things for everyone.
Okay. With that in mind, I shall turn this over to Joe.
Thank you.
MR. JACOBSON: Thank you, John.
You have three columns here. You have 2006 actual, budget in the middle, and on the far right, the 2007 budget.
As you can see, we came in very, very close on revenue. You can see the 2007 budget is similar. It’s a little bit less, but we don’t ever know how much we’re going to get in interest and late fees, that kind of thing, depending on how people pay, how timely. So you’ll see all those are pretty similar.
Wages & Benefits are real similar to what budgeted was and what last year was. Auto Expense you’ll see that wasn’t on there before. That was in Maintenance. We decided with the price of gas we should maybe put another line item in. That’s for the vehicles, you know, that take housekeepers around, and the linens around, and so forth, back and forth to get washed and laundered and back to the villas. So we just put that in a separate line item.
Collections Expenses you will see are up from the budget, but about – actually, last year is not here. They’re not up that much from ’05. That’s a factor of how much work Vicky and the attorney get done, how many collections they get done, as well as what went in there as part of collection. When people pay their dues by credit card, obviously – I don’t know if you all know this, but if you pay by a credit card – if you buy something at Shopko with a credit card, the credit card processing company gets a fee for that all the time, and the merchant pays that – Shopko, in this case.
Well, for years the Association’s just ran on Fox Hills’ credit card machine and none of us ever thought about that Fox Hills is paying all the fees. So this year we kinda caught that, so there’s a little bit of money in fees that are actually the credit card fees from dues paid by credit card in that collection. We put it in Collection Expenses because it’s part of the collection of dues.
Computer Support/Supplies is up a little bit from budget. Bad Debts is down. That means they collected more money from people and we didn’t need to write it off, between Vicky and the attorney, down from budget. We budgeted next year to be there because really it is an educated guess.
Insurance came in a little higher than budget. That comes in mid-year, so that’s why it’s hard to budget. It gets renewed in June. I’ll be working on that, but we have to get it finished up this month. They tell me it might go down, because insurance companies are actually hungry for business again where after Katrina and all those things, they kinda told you what the rate was. There weren’t many of them doing competition…I lost my place here for a moment!
OWNER: Room supplies.
MR. JACOBSON: Okay. Thank you. Room Supplies – that’s just what they put into the rooms. You know, that can vary a little where they put more or less in depending on what people used. I imagine – well, I don’t know if that’s small house wares, but room supplies are just I guess towels, paper products, things like that.
Management Fee – that’s a constant. We capped that a number of years ago. Most management companies raised their fees, but we did a deal with your Board a number of years ago to cap it.
Office Space – you will see that the 2007 budget is at $6400 less. If you’ve been down to the Rec Center, there’s a couple of new offices down there in that lobby. With Lisa leaving and with Vicky and her staff having less to do in collections, as we whittle down the people under land contracts and that weren’t paying their dues, we’re consolidating those positions and we’re moving three into two and moving them down into those offices in that building which will save you a half a year – that $6400 – in rent. It will even get bigger next year, because they’re not in there yet, and it will be a full year’s rent. So the Association will have a net win going forward because we have less than $6400 in building those two offices at this point. So it’s a one year payback and it will be an annual savings of somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year going forward on rent each and every year. So if you wonder why those are going in there, that’s why. Seemed like a no-brainer to me to save the Association all that rental, and it eliminates – actually if they’re down there during the day, we don’t need a pool attendant down there during the day, so it eliminates one more position – the person that sat down there Monday thru Friday, 9-5, watching the pool -because there‘ll be two people down there in the offices.
Bank Charges – that’s just fees on your accounts. Linens – they obviously didn’t buy as many as normal. Normally we just kind of project that. We don’t buy them if we don’t have to. Same thing with Small Kitchen Wares.
Professional Fees was up a little bit in the budget, but again, it’s how much the attorney does with Vicky in collections. You know, we pick a number at the beginning of the year, but it is a little over budget.
Softener Salt – we came in under budget, budgeting a little bit more, but still under last year’s budget. Last year’s budget was on the actual for ’05, so we actually did do a decrease since then.
Pool Maintenance – we’ve found some ways to do that a little more efficiently. You saw on John’s improvements a bromine feeder for the pool. We continue to do things to cut labor, be more efficient, use enough chemicals to make the pool usable but not waste anything. So that’s just a savings we made by learning more about it and automating and so forth.
Cable bill was real close to budget. Telephone is down because we figured out some ways – we’ve cut some lines and done some modernizing to get more out of the incoming lines that we need and were able to cut the bill.
Resort Promotion – I don’t know if we’ll use that all this year. The owners a few years ago approved that $10,000 to do promotion for events for owners. With the 4th of July being in the middle of the week and no MishicotFest this year, we may or may not use that. It’s in the budget, but we may or may not use it all this year.
Trash Removal you’ll see is up over budget. We budgeted that last year when we had a different carrier. That carrier gave us a very good rate in the contract with us; unfortunately, they didn’t live up to their contract. They didn’t pick up our trash as often as they were supposed to. So when their contract was over, we found somebody who would pick up the trash when we needed it picked up. It’s a little bit more expensive, but they do the job. So it’s kind of important that we get the garbage picked up.
You see Postage and Printing. Those vary a little bit. Sometimes we have the people who do the mailing or – I don’t know how that works. If you put Postage and Printing together in all three columns, they almost always come out very close to each other. That’s a combination of printing your newsletter and notices and bill and the mailing of them.
Owners Meeting Expense – that was a little bit under budget so I guess you guys didn’t eat and drink enough last year and saved a couple hundred dollars. Somebody in the front said you’re going to make up for it this year.
Uniforms – that was in Maintenance before and is another thing we decided to break out.
Electric/Gas – the $252,000 was real close to the actual for 2005, so the $229,000 was quite a savings. We did have a pretty warm fall. We probably paid for that in February this year, but you know we also have done many things, whatever we can, to try to save – you know, keep the bills down. A few years ago you’ll remember we put the fronts on the fireplaces. We continue to work on things like that, to turn the units – the temperature down or up depending on the season when nobody is in them, close the blinds, whatever we possibly can because we all know at home that’s not a number that usually goes down. So we did get it to go down last year by a lot of hard work and quite honestly a few good suggestions from you owners in how to conserve energy out there.
Water/Sewer – that came in real close to budget. Again, that’s just obviously how much water you used. There’s not much way to change that except to tell you to shower only once a day or something like that.
Propane was down. We actually were lucky enough to lock in a contract a year ago. We did lock in early. We had to prepay but we kept the propane cost – we had heard propane was going to go up last year so we were able to lock in early and save the Association and ourselves, since we also use propane, some money at the resort here.
You see Extermination went down significantly. We didn’t quit exterminating, but we trained several of our staff here, the maintenance staff, got them certified to use the chemicals and how to do it. That’s done two things – one, it’s saved us a bunch of money in outside firms and we can react much quicker. If you see an ant problem or something, instead of calling somebody and waiting for them to come, we can treat it immediately and keep the problems down too because the reaction time is so much quicker. So that was a double-edged sword there in both areas – one in dollars and solving the problems.
Real Estate Taxes, Personal Property Taxes are real similar.
Renovations/Maintenance – you see that we spent considerably less than we budged. We got most of the work done we wanted to. If you went back to that first list that John did, a lot of the work was construction work we did with our maintenance staff in-house so it isn’t like we skipped a lot of projects. We picked a couple – a lot of it was we used in-house labor instead of a contractor because we had time to do that with our staff which was considerably cheaper than paying outside help. So that’s one of the reasons that labor was just a little bit over budget.
Activities Expense – that was a little under budget. We budgeted about the same.
Fitness Center Allocation – you’ll see that came in about normal. We budgeted less this year because we made some labor and staffing changes. Most hotels you go into you don’t see a person there all the time. In fact, some of the new fitness centers back where I live in the Appleton area are now non-manned fitness centers. You can call and make an appointment if you want training or whatever but they’re non-manned. So as we looked at all that, we just decided, you know, we should follow the trend as most hotels and resorts and not be paying somebody to sit here – you only paid a portion of that, which the owners approved a number of years ago and the resort paid for most of it. I’m always looking to save a dime for myself. Of course, in this area, you came right along with that because the savings are pro rata.
Interest Expense-Other is a little over budget, but similar. We don’t have much control on interest paid on back taxes and utilities, although our utilities are current. They were current last year. As I told you at the meeting we caught up, and today they’re current. This is the first time since we took over here that the utilities have been current. So we’ve kept them current and that expense will continue to go down.
Interest Expense-Developer – under budget. You need to go to the far right column - $6,000. That $6,000 is already paid this year. So you don’t owe us any money any more. You don’t owe the developer a dime. Once the people started paying their dues November through January, the loan is totally paid off. A lot of you who have been here can probably remember at one time it was over a million dollars. So that will be the last you will see of interest to the developer.
(Applause.)
Use Tax is sales tax. If any of you order things from out of state as individuals, you don’t pay. Technically, you’re supposed to report that as use tax and pay it. The small things we bought from out of state – businesses do tend to get audited - you need to pay a use tax on that. So if you wonder what a use tax is, its sales tax. The merchant themselves didn’t charge it because it was an out-of-state merchant.
When you get down to the bottom, you see that total expenses were under budget and total operating income was a little over budget. We’re projecting a real healthy one next year again, and I actually think we’ll beat that budget again because of making some labor changes and so forth. I think we’ll actually come out with a better operating profit next year. It’s hard to calculate that as we make these labor changes, like in the fitness center and so forth.
So if everybody would pay their dues right now – you’ve probably all paid them but we do have dues on the books. Some people – I don’t know why, but they don’t pay it until they use their unit in the summertime even though they’re getting billed late fees all the time. If everybody was paid up right now and there was no outstanding dues, we’d have a lot of property taxes paid as well.
The good news is that there’s enough money coming in to continue to pay on those. But next January when everybody pays, they’ll get paid regardless. So the Association next January should have a surplus and have everything 100% paid off. Right now, the developer is done, that interest will be done, utility interest will be done, and if people continue to pay their dues, we’ll make more progress on property taxes.
Irregardless, next year you’ll be done paying that big interest number – you know, another $40,000-$50,000 per year that will come back into the Association to be used for whatever the Association Board decides to use it for.
So I have to say thank you. Everybody’s worked really hard on this – the employees at Fox Hills, your Board members, past and present, but number one, all of you people. You hung in there. You paid your dues. You gave us a lot of good suggestions. You were patient. I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly happy because it worked out fairly well. We got where we needed to be and we’re not looking back.
The next question going forward will be next year there should be some money for reserve funds. It’s a term we’ve never heard out here! I had to think about that for a minute! You know, the Board can decide what they’ll do with this extra money, but there should be some money put away in case something serious happens. That’s a good thing to have for the Association. So you will have to give your Board your thoughts on things they should do going forward because there will be plenty of money after this coming year to start to do renovations – the places are in better shape now than they were when we took over. Obviously we spent a quarter of a million dollars most years – this year not quite as much of your money, but there’s always more that can be done. So think about that and give your Board members input. We can continue to improve the condominiums the way you the owners would like them. You’re the ones that pay the dues, and are the ones that made this all happen. Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. HOLZSCHUH: Okay. Anybody have any questions about anything that Joe or I could answer? If not, I would just encourage everyone who hasn’t voted to vote today, and if you haven’t, please do so.
The RCI rep did not come down this year, so we don’t have him on the – that’s why he’s missing from the agenda, obviously. I don’t know the particulars of that.
MR. JACOBSON: He’d been our rep for a long time. He sent an e-mail, I believe – Lisa, he was getting assigned to a different area? – and they had not reassigned anybody to this particular area. We will be getting a new rep, so for this year we didn’t – there was nobody available to fly in. So there will be no RCI presentation this year. Not because we didn’t want it, but simply because they’re not here.
(Unintelligible question.)
MR. JACOBSON: SurePay? The gentleman asked if we would explain it. SurePay – he pays his dues – you get it taken out, what, monthly? – for six months. Yeah. They get it taken out over the first six months. If anybody’s interested in that, Vicky or Rebecca can help them with that in the Credit Department. I do believe that’s usually in – that goes out with the annual billing. Yeah, it is in your billing when you get your annual option – I mean in your annual statement. You get that option.
(Unintelligible question.)
MR. JACOBSON: Yeah, I do believe that its next year, but we’ll have to work with them to do the most cost effective thing we can do. If that means we put in different cable, different televisions – you know, we’ll have to make an informed decision. As I understand it – and I’m not very well versed on it – you may know much more than me. I just picked a few articles out of the paper some of the time. I think you can put a converter on any old TV but any digital TV you wouldn’t need a converter for. So then I guess the Board at that time would have to weigh the options over what the monthly fee – from cable who wants to get a few on everything – is it more cost effective to pay that for a few years or, you know, go out and buy new television sets. You know, it will be – when that comes down, it’s going to have to be an analysis of that, you know, with accounting and the Board members present and make the best decision. That’s what we always try to do is make the most cost effective and long-term decision for the Association. We’ll have to do the same in the hotel, you know, look at it and see the cost and make that decision in our own homes too. We all probably have TV’s around that are analog yet.
(Unintelligible question.)
MR. JACOBSON: Yeah, when it shows the income, it just went to pay for anything that needed to be paid. We paid back the developer, the loan to the developer. It just says – we had budgeted for the Association to be positive – when you asked that question – it’s in renovations – it was actually in the budget for last year, but we did less renovations expense so that helped the income go up.
The income was budgeted based on more money than we spent, and then that money was used to pay bills that were not current year bills. You know, legacy bills, you could say. The budget only has current bills. And this is also – some of this is accrued. There are people who still owe dues. We have accrued dues in there.
I believe you usually ask for a balance statement each year. Anybody who wants a balance statement just give Vicky your name and address up here, and that makes it a little clearer. For instance, accrued dues means dues we expect to collect, based on history.
While you’re asking your question, I’m trying not to – I’m not being very clear. I’m not the accountant here, but we took in more money – we spent less money and took in more money in interest and in dues payments than we projected. So that’s why there’s extra money. We projected to take in more – we projected to be positive $287,000 and we ended up positive $413,000 because we spent less in many areas. We were more efficient with our utilities, things like that, than budgeted. So that’s why the difference is there.
(Unintelligible question.)
MR. JACOBSON: Pay the developer, pay interest – both those are now current. Because your budget only shows last year’s expenses. Your budget for ’06 only shows last year’s utilities, and it does not show money owed to the developer, it doesn’t show past interest, things like that. It shows last year’s interest only.
(Unintelligible question.)
MR. JACOBSON: Yes, that will make it clearer for you.
They’re telling me up here that I should make sure that you go to the microphones because this is being taped so if anybody ever wants to listen to it, and if you have a question, it may or may not come thru if you’re not at the microphone. So we’re not trying to inconvenience you, but if anybody wanted to listen to this down the road, and plus when they do the minutes – we have to keep minutes by law and all that so we want to make sure everybody’s questions and answers are on the tape.
Yes?
OWNER #1: My question is as we’re going into the computer age, are our units going to be compatible with laptops eventually?
MR. JACOBSON: That’s a good question. We’re working on that now. Actually, the Rec Center is set up wireless right now. We are – our IT department here at the resort – the whole resort is wireless. It’s going to cost, I believe, a little more to do the condos simply because they’re spread out over a bigger area. I don’t have a price in front of me, but our IT department is working on that price and then it would be a Board of Directors’ decision whether that’s palatable to the Association or not. I do know the price is substantially less than it would have been a few years ago. But if you are out here with a laptop, you can come in any of the resort buildings or the lobby here or the Rec Center. Obviously that’s something with more and more people using computers today that will be nice to have, but – we are working on it, ma'am.
OWNER #2: As long as I’m near a mic, I’d like to – for clarification, my wife and I have been owners for 21 years. They’ve been 21 really good years, but we’re about ready to pass it on. I called one of the young ladies in the office this winter prior to placing an ad in the paper first so I didn’t get myself into any legal problems, and I don’t know if the Board would be the ones to ask or not, but one of the things I asked her was could we actually put our unit in – it’s 8D and it’s two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and the whole bit – and she said, “No, don’t do that, because all you own really is a week.” I said, “Well, I have a deed right here along side me,” and she said, “That’s a legality. You have to have a deed, but all you have is a week.”
Now looking on E-bay last night, there were, I think, five Fox Hills units all of them listed and the fact it was deeded forever. By the way, the frightening thing was the units were going from 99 cents to $99, and none of them had any bids.
A second clarification I would like, and this I think is rather important, is I asked her if we sold the unit would I be able to advertise that these people can use the amenities as all of us do, purchasing through you that we can come up here any time in the summer and use the pool and in the winter time we can use the ski trail. I was told that secondary buyers can no longer use any of the amenities, only those that buy the primary unit from Fox Hills. The only time they can come and use the pools and so forth, the playground, is the week they’re here.
So I’d like some clarification, and indeed, can we advertise a unit, or is that wrong, and do secondary buyers lose the very nice option of using the amenities? Thank you.
MR. JACOBSON: Okay. Let’s take one at a time.
Vicky – you should talk to Vicky about advertising because yes, you can, but that’s not my area of expertise, but very clearly you should talk to her because you can. Yeah. As far as pricing, I go on E-bay and look around at timeshare weeks from resorts all over. They’re fairly cheap, aren’t they?
OWNER #2: Yeah. Hawaii right now is running about $2, no bids.
MR. JACOBSON: I don’t know if people let them go for that. Most of them have a minimum, and the other thing – nothing has changed. The rules we inherited from Mr. Likas said you can’t use – a secondary buyer can’t use – I assume he set it up that way so people would buy from him. But that’s something that a legacy issue we will quickly talk about because since we only have a couple hundred weeks left and we’re not actively selling, there’s nothing really to protect for the developer. So myself, I don’t have an issue if we change that to a secondary buyer. I will talk to everybody else – my partners, and so forth. Until you brought that up, I had forgotten about that. That has always been that way, but I’m glad you brought that up. We’ll address that and get back to you on that.
OWNER #2: Okay. Thank you.
MR. JACOBSON: Thank you, because I would have forgotten about it otherwise.
Yes?
OWNER #3: Two years ago and last year, you talked about fixing the parking around the swimming pool and re-blacktopping and making more room for people on the highway that can come so it don’t get so congested there with no place to park. Is that in the future to do that, to fix it up, ‘cause you got a lot of room and you don’t need all that grass there. Make more parking so people that come from the highway for that swimming pool – so people ain’t getting crowded out in the condos. You were talking the last two years to fix that and make more parking space there.
MR. JACOBSON: It will be done this year. We’re actually looking at that right now. So that will get done.
OWNER #3: That would be great ‘cause you don’t feel like people are pushing you out or something. You gotta make room for them.
MR. JACOBSON: Yes, they park in the spots they shouldn’t and you come back to your unit and you can’t park.
OWNER #3: Okay.
MR. JACOBSON: Yeah, we’re actually mapping that out already. Unfortunately, we didn’t get too much work done this spring with the late snowstorms.
OWNER #3: Thank you.
MR. JACOBSON: Thank you.
OWNER #4: I had two questions, but one of them was kind of answered. The other one is I’d like to thank Lisa for all the help that she’s given us through the years and I think she deserves a big hand.
(Applause.)
OWNER #5: Another question that we were talking about at the table is how many owners are there and how many weeks are still available and how many does the Association own and how many does the developer own?
MR. JACOBSON: There’s over 4800 owners – Vicky? Is that correct? – over 4800. The developer has under 500 weeks. I don’t know the exact percentage because there are even/odd owners. So there’s not 5200 weeks. We’d have to add up the even/odd owners, you know, make that into a single owner. That would be somewhere less than 4800, but if you go on that scale, the Association has 90% of the weeks is what they own, roughly. It’s not an exact figure, but its close enough for easy math.
OWNER #6: Hi. Kurt Keller from Forest Junction. I think I brought this up a year or two ago, but as we get to a point where we’re actually being sold out, I think it would be a very smart suggestion that the Board and Fox Hills actually have a re-sale office in order for us who do want to sell to have an opportunity to do that because if anybody is going to contact and try to buy here, this is the best spot to do the advertising from. And in with that, if you have a good owner base who is happy to be here, that just improves the owner’s association.
So if I can make the suggestion once more, please consider having a re-sale office.
MR. JACOBSON: Okay. And we will bring it up to the Board. If you remember last year, when we got some back on foreclosure, we did mail out to all the owners since, you know, a lot of you bought some extra units and so forth and did handle some of that that way, giving the owners a first offer on some very reasonable units because they were coming back on foreclosure and there wasn’t a lot of money in them.
So that’s how we did handle it in the past. That doesn’t help an owner who wants to sell. Those are just units we had to foreclose on, unfortunately, or the Association got back from bad dues, you know, unpaid dues or whatever – units that were quit-claimed back to us.
So that’s a good point, Kurt.
OWNER #7: Maybe this is nit-picking, but I don’t think it is. We only have one chance to make a first impression, and I know Fox Hills Association can’t do much about it, but maybe they can talk to the Mishicot board, but Mishicot – the golf courses and the buildings and everything are magnificent, really, when you pull in. That gift shop with a half a roof on it is the worst possible impression you’ve got on pulling into the unit. It almost looks as though it’s part of the unit on the golf course, and I know within a few years the thing is going to fall down by itself, but it gets worse every time we come up here. Please see if something can be done about that.
MR. JACOBSON: We actually have talked to them about that. A private party owns it and they’ve been trying to sell it. I don’t know that the Village can – well, I guess they can say it’s a hazard or something, you know.
OWNER #7: Or be condemned.
MR. JACOBSON: They could do something about it if they wanted to, but I don’t think they can do much if they pay their taxes. They probably can as a health hazard or whatever. We have talked to them about it. We can bring it up again. There are some new people at the Village. The long-term president isn’t running this year – retired. I’m not saying things will change, but we have brought it up and will again.
I vote for a big wind like you and hope it goes down sooner than later.
OWNER #8: Hi. We’re the 330th owners at Fox Hills, and our question is what is Fox Hills’ status with RCI?
MR. JACOBSON: What do you mean by “status”? We’re still RCI members.
OWNER #8: Right. We’re gold crown.
MR. JACOBSON: We’re silver crown. Yeah. We have been silver crown. This year is going to be an interesting year. I don’t know what they tell you, what you get as owners, but I know what we get. They did change their forms, their comment card scores. They changed how you fill them out a little bit. They changed the writing of the questions that they ask you, the criteria, and then they took the standards up. They claim they did exhaustive tests and that it’s going to help us, the resorts, not hurt them. But there may be a little shakeout period the first year until you, the owners, get used to filling them out. So I just warn you ahead of time. We don’t know what’s coming for this year because of the new grading system.
But we have made it the four or five previous years – silver crown. We actually have been gold crown in every category except for unit quality now for about three years. Hopefully now as the Association has some money to put in reserve funds you can update some of the units and get that taken care of as well. But in most categories, we’re over the gold crown scores, and have been for quite a while.
If we have no more questions, how about some eats and drinks down in the Crystal Room.
(Applause.)
MR. HOLZSCHUH: I need to make a motion to adjourn the meeting.
I need a second.
All in favor?
AUDIENCE: Aye.
MR. HOLZSCHUH: Anybody opposed?
So moved.
Thank you.
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