And Why, Pray Tell, Was Favil West Shaking His Head, “No” While Board President

Dea McDonald Was Saying “Yes?”

Or

What Happens When the Right Hand Does Not Know What the Left Hand Has Been Up To?

 

Everyone in attendance at the year's end Board Meeting was very well informed with awesome reports about our forthcoming budget and transition matters, that even included a tasty, mouth-watering and welcomed report about Trumpets and their upcoming plans to attract even more customers to their fine dining experience. But being so well informed did not, as we witnessed, extend to our Association's president, Dea McDonald. Unfortunately for Mr. McDonald, although we must acknowledge not through any fault of his own making, we are crediting Dea with the "Oops" Award of the Year, even though some may with justification be equally correct in believing that this award should properly fall to others. 

 

By way of introduction, a quite unusual, almost unique event occurred at the Board of Director’s meeting on the 18th. This quite unexpected event brought forth a number of issues of potential interest to the community, not so much for what we learned, but for how well we communicate with our developer/partner important details concerning a major, community-wide development. In this instance, the development concerns the forthcoming traffic movement of Highlands and Provence drivers up and down Anthem Parkway and SCA Drive to Eastern Avenue but also concerning where Del Webb now stands on their past commitment to the community to help mitigate that anticipated traffic congestion problem, given that Bicentennial Pkwy. will no longer provide the exit strategy that Del Web had promised. Some of those issues that were brought forward at this meeting include:   

 

• Del Webb, or at least the President of the Association, Dea McDonald, was obviously clueless about Focus Property Group’s plans to make Bicentennial Parkway virtually unusable as an exit strategy for Highlands and Provence drivers by restricting its speed to 25 mph.

• Aside from what DW knew, or in this case, what they did not know, our resident Board members apparently kept Del Webb’s representatives in the dark about the results of their several meetings with the Focus Property Group.

• Also unknown to Del Webb was the fact that our resident Board members were engaged in negotiating with Focus Property Group for Sun City to actually support their plans for effectively closing Bicentennial as a viable way out of Anthem.

• Without any communications between the resident Board members and DW on their activities with Focus Property Group, the Board’s President was left, as they say, to twist in the wind in his failed attempt to correctly respond to a question from the audience.

• What does this tell us and Del Webb about that close, working partnership we have read so much about.

 

Just how did this grand faux pas go down? Innocently enough, a resident had submitted a Blue Comment Card, providing an opportunity for the President of the Association to respond to questions from the audience. The question concerned the intended use of Bicentennial to funnel Highlands (and now Provence) traffic west out of Anthem instead of having that traffic flow down our parkways and exit onto Eastern Ave. While I do not recall the precise wording of the question, the gist of the resident’s question was to ask whether the westward extension of Bicentennial, where Focus Property Group is now the developer, would serve as a speedy exit for those wishing to travel north out of Anthem. That, after all, was Del Webb’s initial proposal for the future development of Bicentennial and, least we not forget, that traffic exit strategy for Highlands residents was a key linchpin of the community’s acceptance of Anthem Highlands back in the spring of 2002. Del Webb had virtually guaranteed that Bicentennial would eliminate the need for Highlands residents to rely on Sun City’s major parkways to enter and exit their Highlands community.

 

With the above in mind, and not being aware or told of anything different, Mr. McDonald’s response made perfect sense. He said, in effect, nothing had changed and that DW’s original planned use for Bicentennial remained the same—Highlands residents could be expected to speed their way in and out of Anthem using Bicentennial. While Dea was saying that, those in the audience were witnessing a melt-down of sorts as Favil’s head starting to move, from one side to the other, expressing the fact obvious to many in the audience that Dea was not merely dead wrong, but that Del Webb’s prior commitment to the community on this traffic matter was literally out the window. Mr. West was anxious to help Dea recover from the quicksand he found himself mired in by taking control of the microphone and pulling Dea out of harms way. Mr. West, who was not especially eager to delve into the details of Bicentennial at that time, was quick to suggest that we can learn more about Focus Property Group’s street plans by attending their upcoming meeting here in early December.

 

Fortunately, Mr. West had kept the resident community informed about their meetings and Focus’ snail-moving plans for moving traffic west on Bicentennial about two months ago back, in September, through his article in the Chuck Davis' Anthem Compendium. From Dea McDonald’s performance at the Board meeting, Favil’s two month old news was apparently lost on DW and Dea McDonald, garnering our unequivocal, “Oops” Award of the Year for his giant misstep in running into that giant Bicentennial proverbial block wall of a snail mover.

 

Del Webb might even wonder just what, pray tell, were our resident leaders up to operating behind the backs of our “king of the hill” benefactor and developer? On the other hand, perhaps our resident leaders, anticipating the resident's soon total take over of the Board, were exercising their anticipated early independence wings by coloring Del Webb, as it were, out of the picture. That would be an "Oops" of a different kind. Whatever the reason, that’s for DW to work through as they reevaluate their close working relationship issues.