My Turn

Bitter in Sunrise By Virginia Kennedy In three short weeks since Sunrise Lake has elected a board of directors for its newly formed community association, resident Barbara Chapman has editorialized in three separate letters on the potential evils of the new board and of Concerned Citizens, the group of Sunrise families that pursued a lawsuit against Sunnylands, Inc. and Sunrise Ventures, Inc. (SL/SV), the developers and builders who have owned and run Sunrise until this year. While her distress at losing the election is understandable - no one likes to lose - her misrepresentations and negativity need to be answered. Ms. Chapman’s warnings against apathy in her latest letter are an admirable sentiment. It seems contradictory then, that she should be so troubled by the grass roots community action of Concerned Citizens, a group of over 200 Sunrise families. These families decided precisely not to be apathetic in the face of the deterioration of our community. The lawsuit was brought because we could not understand why we paid relatively similar dues to communities like Water Forest and Conashaugh, and yet these communities managed to maintain nice pools, tennis courts, basketball courts, and have garbage disposal services and good roads, while Sunrise was reduced to paying the same money and receiving only road maintenance. Our deeds make clear that amenities like the pool and courts would be maintained by the builders, and they were not. The suit requested an accounting of all dues monies and expenditures, a return of all our amenities to usable condition as guaranteed in our deeds, and the installment of a neutral receiver to examine and run the community finances. SL/SV would not accept a receiver nor could they produce adequate records for monies spent on community needs in the context of monies spent on all the houses they were building and selling in Sunrise. In light of Concerned Citizen’s lawsuit that demanded SL/SV be accountable to the community whose money they were collecting each year, SL/SV - not Concerned Citizens - made the decision to turn the community over to a property owners association. A free and fair election was held and overseen by a neutral local attorney agreed upon by all parties. Ms. Chapman and several other community members ran under the group title of “Responsible Residents.” All candidates were given equal opportunity to campaign and get their message out. Responsible Residents were supported by SL/SV and the Ramagosas, who even donated money to our local fire department so that they would bring a hook and ladder truck into the community to hang a professionally made “Responsible Residents” sign from the telephone poles at our entrances. In an election with an excellent turnout - which also hopefully gives Ms. Chapman some relief from her concerns about Sunrise apathy - six members of Concerned Citizens and one member of Responsible Residents were elected to the board. Ms. Chapman, who has been a Sunrise resident for all of three years, arriving about the same time that Concerned Citizens initiated their grass roots action, has very little context for characterizing her fellow community members as “discontented” or having a sense of “entitlement” as she has in her editorial letters. She has very little reason to think that a large group of residents are apathetic - residents who aggressively questioned the builders collecting our money why we were paying a 25% mark up on every invoice, why none of the community work went out for competitive bid, and why other communities paying similar dues managed much better upkeep. And while disparaging fellow Sunrise residents, Ms. Chapman paints the wealthy builders who let the community deteriorate as victims of angry residents falsely accusing them of mismanagement. Ms. Chapman writes “wear and tear and age caught up to the community and as the development grew, resources thinned. Sunnylands tried to keep the dues low. It felt obligated to the working class families who had raised their children here and now were retired on meager pensions.” What she fails to make clear, perhaps because she doesn’t know since she has been here such a short time, is that the growth of the community was due almost solely to development by Sunnylands, the very same corporation that Ms. Chapman credits with being so “obligated to the working class families.” No one forced Sunnylands to build the community to the point where they felt collected dues could no longer pay for upkeep of amenities guaranteed in Sunrise deeds. As Ms. Chapman correctly points out, Sunnylands is a for-profit corporation. They were and are not the charity organization Ms. Chapman believes them to be. Perhaps if she had lived here longer or attempted to air her grievances sooner than a couple of months before the election took place, she might have more and better information. The simple fact of the matter seems to be that Ms. Chapman is a sore loser. She raises the specter of Mussolini and Idi Amin to talk about a community association board that has been in place for three weeks and implies that her apathetic neighbors will suffer at the hands of this vicious new board who wants to place straightjacket restrictions on their lives. But, there are no third world strongmen or fascist dictators here, as much as Ms. Chapman might like to suggest otherwise. There was a free, fair, and open election under terms agreed to by the developers. The residents of Sunrise voted their preference based on an open campaign run by all candidates, and Ms. Chapman lost. She needs to come to terms with that in more productive ways than fear mongering and misrepresentation. And perhaps she would consider giving the new board more than three weeks to demonstrate what they can accomplish for the community. As is the good fortune within a democratic system, elections will be held again, and Ms. Chapman as well as any other Sunrise owner is welcome to run. In the meantime, perhaps she would be willing to let those that actually did win do their work, without harassment and her sour grapes. Virginia Kennedy is a writer and teacher by profession, a 15-year Sunrise resident, and was a former volunteer organizer for Concerned Citizens until she stepped back before the board elections to finish her doctoral dissertation.