RSFA Strategic Planning Meeting

Author: Phil Trubey

Date: September 4, 2022

The RSF Association Board met Tuesday for its annual strategic planning meeting. I found the location deliciously ironic. We met at Osuna ranch under a party rental's tent, with the post meeting social gathering finding all of us huddling near the Osuna Adobe's dwindling shade. Ironic since while it showcased Osuna's rugged beauty and historic nature, it also highlighted its easily rectifiable deficiencies. More on that below.

RSFA Board President Dan Comstock led a streamlined meeting where everyone's voices were heard, yet lasted only two hours.

Let Staff Do Their Jobs

One of the things this new Board has recognized is that the current staff executive team is very good. We have new senior staff that are energized and very competent. Our new Assistant Manager, Dominique Albrecht, brings a wealth of experience as the Assistant City Manager for Coronado. I've worked with her on technology upgrades and she has a very sharp mind. Anyone who has met the new Golf Club GM, Todd Huizinga, knows he is a very competent executive who has a great vision for not just the Golf Club, but also member services in general. We have a great tennis GM in John Chanfreau, and likewise at Osuna with Christine Praefke. The Building Department was recently strengthened with new hires/promotions as well.

So, at the strategic planning meeting, we made it clear that we trusted and expected staff to develop project plans.

Job #1: Maintain and Enhance

And what projects would those be? Well, if you look at the Association, you find that it owns a lot of commercial properties:

• Golf Club
• Tennis Club
• Restaurants
• Riding Stables
• 60 miles of Equestrian Trails
• Recreation Fields
• Gigabit Fiber Network
• Recreational Properties (Arroyo and others)
• Office and maintenance buildings

This is on top of services like the building department (a mini municipal permitting agency) and the Patrol.

Any good steward of commercial properties knows that you must continually maintain the property and enhance it from time to time or else you'll look around one day and realize you own blighted property. Other communities around us keep enhancing their facilities, we must do the same.

Over the 21 years I've lived here, our Board has had various challenges, like not having a proper accounting system, and various self inflicted wounds, like spending a lot of money on buying property with no plan to best use the property, and most recently, a myopic focus on rules and regulations.

This year, this Board has a strong consensus on maintaining and enhancing our community assets and services, and if we can add a choice few new services, even better.

To that end, we made it clear at the strategic planning meeting that we wanted the staff to put together plans and options for proper maintenance and enhancement of each of the items in the above list with an eye on the feedback received from the community survey.

Obviously some facilities are in better shape than others (the Golf Club has been well looked after, and the Fiber Network is too new to need significant maintenance), while others have been ignored for too long - and that includes not obvious things like the golf and tennis recreation campus parking lot which was never built properly in the first place, and has some real maintenance issues now. It may not sound exciting, but enhancing the parking lot is very much needed.

How Much Will This Cost?

Wrong question and let me explain why. One of the complaints I heard from the continuing Board members when I joined the Board was that the historical budget process was backwards. It started from expected revenue from the $0.14/$100 assessment and then figured out what you could do with that money. This is as opposed to figuring out what is needed to be done, and then figuring out how to pay for it (and assessments are only one of many funding sources).

The Association has shown flexibility in the past when projects were deemed important enough. A loan was taken out to pay for Golf Club building renovations in 2007, which golf club members have been paying for. Likewise, another loan was taken out to pay for the Fiber Network. In both of these large projects (about $8M for the golf club remodel and $16M for the Fiber Network), assessments remained unchanged at $0.14/$100.

And the Association hasn't explored other funding mechanisms in recent memory like selling naming rights. There's a reason the Baseball Diamond is called Richardson Field.

Conclusion

The end result of the strategic planning session was that the Board asked staff to work on maintenance/enhancement plans for the entire Association being mindful of the recently completed community survey (which showed, among other things, that the community cared about safety and security, as well as Village Revitalization).

Of course, there are a whole host of other things the Board will be working on this year. There are some regulations that are still in process (lighting, grading, etc). Here in the Post's discussion forums, there seems to be some consensus for some sort of new noise regulation (we currently don't have one). What started off as a discussion about gas versus battery leaf blowers morphed into a discussion about general noise issues. Please give your thoughts here.

I personally would be interested in hearing your thoughts about sharing the horse trails with e-bikes. Is that safe, possible, advisable, necessary? Let's have a discussion about that here.

In addition, as I mentioned above, Dominque Albrecht is spearheading a project to modernize not only the Association website, but also give members a convenient app for things like reporting maintenance issues, checking account balances, and receiving notices. Some of the Association's internal systems, like those used by the building department also need modernization.

And the Association staff have a long list of mini-projects they are continually working on. Onwards and upwards!