Howard Levine

 

Howard Levine

Candidate for Huntington Lakes Section 1 Board of Directors

 I’ve served on the board for the past two years as Treasurer and Chairman of the Building and Elevators Committee. I successfully supervised the 2020 audit and have been actively learning the Building and Elevator functions.  As a full-time resident of Huntington Lakes, I have a very strong interest in making sure that our community is well run with respect to providing the infrastructure and amenities we all want as cost-effectively as possible. We all want to enjoy living here and maintain our property values.

 I’ve served on other boards with buildings, staff, and membership responsibilities. I am familiar with the need to plan for building and grounds maintenance for an organization. These boards also worked through personnel issues including pay, hiring, and firing.

 In addition, I have an education allowing me to understand management issues and work to solve them. I have an MBA and a Public Policy Graduate Certificate (Post Masters). I read and understand financial statements, determine what drives costs for our association, understand and even calculate appropriate reserves for property maintenance, optimize operations, understand legal compliance issues, and help manage projects. As an Association Board member, I have done this even if other board members disagreed with me.

 Most of my career was in Information Technology. This required implementing big changes affecting a lot of people. I’ve always worked at being responsive to people affected by a change while implementing those changes. I would like that to be the standard operating procedure for the board.

 I am still concerned about the financial management of the association. Non-compliant budgets we’ve had during the past 5 years including the current one produce financial disasters like we experienced with the half million dollar deficit. Defective and deceptive budgeting also create funding shortages requiring special assessments which we had in 2022 and are needed even more in 2023. These special assessments are NOT caused by unpredictably large cost increases. They are caused by non-compliant, poorly constructed budgets and Condo 1 deficits. Although financial transparency has been promised and claimed by many board members, there has been none since the end of 2021. When a board violates budgeting rules, you cannot realistically expect financial transparency – and you are not getting it. Instead of holding back information, the board should clearly communicate the association’s financial situation so owners can realistically plan ahead financially to meet their condo obligations with as little disruption to their personal finances as possible. Getting surprised by special assessments due to either incompetent or deceptive budgeting is not respectful to owners and exposes them to additional financial stress and costs. Anyone on the board during the past 5 years who voted in favor of any budget has participated in presenting you a defective budget. You need to consider whether you want financial surprises and special assessments resulting from those votes when you cast your ballot for board members.

This is my home. I want to contribute to keeping it a great place to live. I would appreciate your vote for me as a director of our Condo Association.

 Get more information at https://honest-hl1.blogspot.com.

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