Organizing Our Creativity

If you agree that the Stephens Valley (SV) Owners have immense talent and creativity, then it is time to talk about how to use it. The Owners might work to compose a list of grievances, and since Festivus is upon us, they could air them! Alternately, we could start by figuring out how we can become a more cohesive group and organize something similar to the First Continental Congress, through which we could address the SV Board of Directors as a group. Either step would be good.

Anyone who downloads and uses the TownSquare app ought to take a little time to go to the Documents link and check out the Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions. It is a long, complicated document, written in legalese, but everyone should review it. Though there is a lot of discussion there about the powers and the membership of the Board, don’t get hung up on that. There is a special exclusion sentence that makes it clear that the Board will be exclusively chosen and run by the Rochford team for a very long time. That might not be a bad thing, but it does mean that the Owners do not presently have a voice, nor a vote, in how decisions are made about the neighborhood. But there are ways to work within that environment.

It is important that the Owners pursue an organizational architecture that allows them to talk with the SV Board as a collective. Pursuing such conversations as individuals, makes the individual small and powerless, and easy to ignore. There are about 150 Owner families now – likely enough to form the critical mass necessary to have a voice.

It seems that the Board would like to work with the Owners – perhaps up to a point. We should try to find where the limits of that bandwidth of cooperation exist and try to work there, at least initially. If the Board could just embrace transparency, a relationship could be off to a good start. There are many other documents and filings that are of interest to the Owners. Those documents ought to be posted to TownSquare. When the Board schedules a meeting and creates an agenda, information about those meetings ought to be published with information on how Owners might participate. The same goes for the “Design Review Committee.” You will not find that group mentioned in the CC&R, but it is believed that the Design Review Committee exists to carry out the mission of the Architectural Committee discussed therein. Why shouldn’t Owners have access to the applications considered by that committee along with the decisions they render?

Learning how to simply consume information about the Board’s activity, even before we might begin to offer opinions from the Owners’ perspective, seems like a place where our creativity could begin to grow. The Board might also learn that engaging with the Owners could provide them immediate benefits. The Owners certainly want the Board and the Rochford team to be successful. As the Board approaches events like any hearings before the Metropolitan Planning Commission, they might need Owners to testify in their behalf. It seems likely that if we start talking to each other, such help from Owners would be likely to occur.

It is hoped that this column will appear monthly, at a minimum, and it will attempt to illuminate the SV opportunities for creativity and partnership with our pseudo government right here in our beautiful valley. But I am not going to go it alone on authoring these essays. If you like to write, please join me in this endeavor. I think the next issue ought to deal with ideas on how we can choose our own “congress” to begin to consider consensus issues that can be communicated to the Board. 

William Ray - Author