Favil West Puts Down a Rumor

on the

Business Development Club

In last week’s Ch. 99 President's Report, Favil West discussed a number of interesting topics, including the Board’s communication of their decision on the charter of the Business Development Club and on the status of the Trumpets forensics audit. On occasion, as in this instance, Mr. West devoted a portion of his message to affirm or put down this or that rumor.

Last week’s rumor put-down was, in my mind, a real doozy.  Most people watching Ch. 99 must have been totally confused, had no idea what Mr. West was talking about, or thought that Favil was suffering from something when he emphatically proclaimed to thousands of residents, “That’s not going to happen.”  Yes, folks, Mr. West says he is staying put, and that he is not selling his home and moving away “because of the Business Development Club issue.” Did you catch that? What issue might that be, our resident TV audience must have wondered in some puzzlement. And even if there was some “issue” involving the Business Development Club (BDC), why would some folks actually think that Mr. West might leave town because of it? Sounds ominous and very strange. 

With just a little bit more information, I hope you will come to understand what the Board has done in this matter and learn what the fuss is all about. As our readers have come to understand, the BDC’s problems with the Board were not self inflicted as some might believe, but were manufactured out of whole cloth by the Board so that they could extract some measure of punishment for the Club’s summer seminars on the Trumpets lease and other Sun City topics of interest.

Yes, admittedly, there were those procedural missteps that cropped up as the BDC got going. They did "x" when they should have done "y," etc. However, these missteps were not unlike those that any new club might encounter on start-up, needing only informal counseling by the Lifestyle Committee to set them straight and on the correct path. And, of course, there are examples of similar problems that have surfaced in recent months in well established chartered clubs that have not followed their own or Association rules and guidelines. But they were not talking about Trumpets.   

No, this was to be very serious business. The Board was set upon the task of correcting their own failures, not, interestingly, the failures of the BDC. For in reality, the BDC had done no wrong, as difficult as that is to imagine. You might ask, why would the Board proceed against the charter of the BDC if the BDC had done no wrong, that is, no serious wrong necessitating the attention of the Board?

Having just gone through how irrational and ruthless the Board can be in their shameful treatment of a resident who sought the Board's attention, one should not be surprised or diminish the capacity of the Board to be just as irrational and ruthless in dealing with a chartered club perceived by the Board as a potential nuisance. This is how governance is currently operating in Sun City. Make no mistake, this matter is not about a rule or guideline that was not adhered to. The issues here are about who exercises power and how that power is used. The Board was about extracting punishment from the BDC for their having, as Len Chapman once correctly noted, ignored "oral" advice.

While that sell and move away rumor might have been wishful thinking by some, the issue behind the rumor needs explanation. You may ask, why might some folks think that Favil might sell his home and move away following the Board’s November decisions concerning the Business Development Club's future? It’s hard to tell whether Mr. West wanted to spill the beans about the Board’s decisions that adversely affected the BDC, otherwise why did he bring the matter up on Ch. 99 of all places, realizing that his message reaches into virtually every home in the community. You’re likely thinking, well, “What decisions did the Board make?”

Here's the problem. In the absence of a rule that would guide a Club's behavior, how could a chartered club be put on notice of what conduct is a violation and what conduct is not? The answer: without such a rule, a club could not be put on notice. Without notice, prior conduct cannot be a violation or a crime, under well established principles of fairness. For example, a rule should not be created tomorrow which will hold a Club responsible for something the Club does today or did yesterday. When fairly applied, rules affecting Clubs should be binding only from the date of their creation or from some future date. To apply an Association rule or guideline retroactively would be wrong and unfair, or so we would hope and expect. But that's not the case in Sun City.

While governments generally and even the U.S. Constitution makes clear that Congress cannot pass an ex post facto law which penalizes activities committed before the enactment of a law, that fairness principle is not at the top of the Board's priorities when it comes to rule making decisions. As we shall see, fairness would not be on the table when it came to the Board's finding that the BDC had committed serious violations of their charter.

In terms of the Board’s disciplinary actions taken against the BDC, the authorized, monitored, and permitted actions of the BDC in holding the summer seminar series came first while the “crime” or violation of those same actions came later. In brief, the Board decided to create by definition a potential charter violation retroactively where none had existed. Having created that potential violation, the Board then found the BDC guilty. If you find such efforts by your Board troubling, you are not alone. One gets the feeling that shaming members of the Board for such behavior is a waste of time as they are not listening and they apparently do not care. The Board had a different agenda in mind.

Please understand that the BDC never engaged in any wrongful acts of the type that warranted the Board's attention, unless you happen to believe that addressing the terms and conditions of the Trumpets lease was a wrongful act by some standard (which it wasn’t). The simple truth of the matter is that were it not for the BDC having engaged in their summer seminar series that included the boring subject of the Trumpets lease, the Board would not have any interest in challenging BDC’s charter and tinkering with their bylaws. The Association's attorney John Leach made this point very clear when he suggested at that this hearing would not exist were it not for the Trumpets lease issue. Although my recollection is dated, I think Mr. Leach said something along the lines that had the BDC offered a seminar using a standard business lease agreement, we would not be here today.  

So how did the Board propose to address this sensitive matter of BDC's offering to review and analyze the Trumpets lease? More importantly, how would the Board turn BDC's summer series, a well known and widely advertised effort, from an approved and sanctioned effort into a violation of BDC's charter?

It accounts for little that the Board waited until after after the completion of the BDC's summer seminar series to declare that the BDC was in violation of their charter for holding these topical seminars. The price for the Community and the BDC for talking about Trumpets would be a very high price to pay.

Here is how they did it.

• One of the acknowledged purposes of the BDC was “to inform and educate on ‘business development.’” With “business development” as their standard, the BDC could properly and correctly address virtually any business related topic under the sun, including the Trumpets lease and related subjects.
• To overcome that "business development" hurdle, the Board needed some type of ruse or gimmick that would accomplish two things: 1) deny the right of the BDC to set their own business-related agendas in the future; and 2) retroactively make the BDC's summer seminar series a violation of the Club's charter.
• In order to accomplish these two objectives, the Board created a definition of the term “business development,” one that was crafted in such a way that would support the Board's charge that the BDC had violated the terms of their charter when they offered their summer seminar program. Instead of "business development" having a broad-based meaning, that term now meant just what the Board wanted and needed for their purposes, plus the Board-created definition was then applied retroactively back to when the Club's bylaws were first created.  
• Since the Board-created definition precluded the topics BDC offered in their summer seminar series, the BDC’s summer seminar series was now determined to be “outside” of the meaning of the BDC’s charter.  As a result, the BDC would now be found “guilty” of violating their own charter.
• The critical point here is not that sanctions would result, as they might for any violation, but that sanctions would result because the BDC talked about the Trumpets lease, a topic now deemed by the Board to be outside of the BDC's charter.
• Not yet finished in their move against the BDC, the Board then proceeded to declare that what had transpired at the summer seminar series was not “business” at all but was, instead, “politics.” And, mind you, since “politics” was ostensibly the purview of the Current Events Club, the BDC violated their own charter anew by engaging in matters that were under the jurisdiction of another club, thereby creating another "guilty" violation for the Board to find.
• Never mind that the Current Events Club when discussing Sun City matters almost exclusively deals in his or her lay opinion, speculation of all sorts, and unsubstantiated rumors, the meat and potatoes of Sun City topics on the Current Events table. On the other hand, the BDC had in the case of Trumpets engaged in a technical and quite boring review and analysis of the Association’s lease with S&D Café V LLC. But the Board had no real interest in what had taken place in the seminars. For the purpose of establishing BDC’s guilt, the Board was interested only in making sure there were sufficient heavy duty “Trumpets” nails in BDC’s body to make sure that their case against the BDC did not fall from the proverbial cross.  
• The "bad light" test. In wrapping up their array of penalties and sanctions imposed against the BDC, the Board cautions that while the BDC is on a proposed period of probation for six months, the Board will determine whether the BDC is in compliance with this and that Association rule or guideline. However, the Board did not let matters rest with just overseeing BDC’s actions to demonstrate mere compliance with Association rules and guidelines. No, indeed. The Board goes on to apply what it refers to as their “bad light” test to the BDC, citing as their authority the Charter Club Guidelines. Here is what the Charter Club Guidelines state, in part, at 2.2(E), Rev. 2005 as posted on the Community's website.*

“Charters may be revoked for the following reasons: . . . . when a club or the Association is cast in an undesirable situation . . . .”

In the case of the BDC, however, the Board in their letter to the BDC “modified” the CC Guidelines, although purporting to rely specifically on the language contained in those very Guidelines, to say something quite different and along with that something quite disturbing. Here is what the Board stated in their attorney's sanctions letter to BDC’s attorney:

“Of particular concern [to the Board in their evaluation of the BDC] will be the perceived effort on the part of the BDC and its membership to cast the Association, the Board of Directors and portions of the community in a bad light.”  

• The Board, while applying its “bad light” test to the BDC, as they may do in the case of actions of any Club pursuant to the CC Guidelines, has gone far beyond the intent of the CC Guidelines to substantially “modify” those Guidelines to now include individual residents who are members of the Business Development Club, and by reference to include any and all members of any chartered club.
• Note especially the inclusion of the phrase “AND ITS MEMBERSHIP” in the above. Even dismissing the fact that “AND ITS MEMBERSHIP” refers back to nothing contained in the language of the CC Guidelines, one must question the Board on the use of such an onerous test of allegiance that can be used against members of the community based on their speech or actions due solely to their association with a particular club, or to any Club as the case may be.
• Such an onerous and uncalled for test cannot help but remind Sun City residents, if not members of the Board who seem not to want to listen, of those distasteful periods in our own country's history, as well as the despised and abhorrent practices engaged in by totalitarian régimes that traditionally rely on guilt by association and the need to prosecute and persecute those who are unwilling to conform to another’s will of what is considered acceptable behavior. If that was not the Board's intent, then why did the Board include "oversight" over the behavior of members of the club?
• Are potential enemies of the "state" now on notice? A reasonable person just might conclude that is exactly what the Board is telling us.
• Is the Board not threatening by intimidation to retaliate against residents from becoming members of or who may wish to participate in the activities of the Business Development Club? Has the Board by fiat managed to modify the Charter Club Guidelines in such a manner that would allow the Board to charge a violation against any Club member who, as the Board see it, has engaged in some perceived effort to cast the Association or the Board of Directors in a bad light?

The above examples are but a continuing reminder of how members of our Board want the Community to know how they are serving the Community's interests. As Mr. West stated in this week's Ch.99 Report, the Board is "acting in the best interests of the entire Community."

Ron Johnson, 6 December 2006, Rev.