NASH RANCH ROAD ASSOCIATION
Board Meeting – Saturday Sept 27, 2015.
Spinardi residence, Big Meadow Road.
Minutes by Bruce Wicinas
Pre-meeting at the Martinez crossing culvert, 10:00 AM. Francois Christen, Tom Spinardi, Don Harris, Paul Meillieur, Bruce Wicinas
Discussed by all board members: three means for reducing risk at the Martinez culvert crossing:
· Do nothing.
· Build up the berm.
· Build up the berm and raise the road.
“In any case let’s dig out the out-flow.”
(The board reconvened at the Spinardi parcel about 10:50 AM) This is from an audio recording – somewhat cut, grossly re-ordered.
Tom: My insurance guy told me our insurance is not necessary. I talked to Bramble. He says we have two insurances.
Francois: We have D&L insurance, which protects us.
Tom: He says, “your policy does not cover subsidence.”
Bruce: It sounds like it would benefit by having an expert’s review.
Francois: Clow buys services from us. The individual owners don’t have the right to vote in our association. They don’t have the right to question our decisions.
Tom: is it Clow or Clowe?
Don: On the road sign, there’s an “e”
All: So that’s how the “Clowe” idea started!
Don: Emergency services does not have the correct names of our roads.
Bruce: That’s a big problem.
Paul: Which of the three options: do nothing; build up the berm; build up the berm and raise the road.
Francois: I think it’s a waste of money. So let’s spend $2000 or less.
Bruce: It’s a waste of money – why?
Francois: I don’t think it will do anything. The culvert will collapse before it washes out.
Bruce: I disagree. So there’s no point in arguing it.
Tom: How do you vote, Bruce?
Bruce: It’s hard to vote without knowing costs.
Francois: I’m proposing we spend no more than $2000.
Tom: I think we can do both for $2000.
Bruce: Then let’s do them.
Don: Who’s going to do the work? Steve is tied up. I think we need Plan B.
Tom: Steve is spread thin. He has not started on the work at the slide. Oct 15 is typically the limit date for outdoor work.
Paul: I’m sure I can get Titus.
Tom: Maybe we sub-out the work at the slide to somebody else?
Bruce: That requires a somewhat technical, engineered fix, doesn’t it?
Tom: We had Bird do some stuff.
Don: Are you proposing we do both simultaneously and get both done by Oct 15?
Bruce: We must do the slide first. The crossing does not have to be done before the first rain.
Tom: Steve can do the Martinez crossing when he rocks the road. It’s pretty simple.
Don: From the reserve fund, or from general fees?
Tom: General fees.
Paul: The more work the better. I would be really concerned about water running across the road and down the steep slope on the downstream.
Tom: Colin made a good point. Water is going underneath the culvert, getting into the fill from everywhere.
Don: I vote we do both.
Tom: Does anybody disagree?
Francois: We spend no more than $2000.
Paul: No need to have it done before Oct 15.
Tom: A lot of the non-payers are on Clow.
Francois: There were problems with the billing. We’ve corrected it.
Don: The total?
Tom: Total owed is $7000. That’s LR and UR.
Tom: I’m willing to take people to small claims.
Bruce: Who did it last?
Francois: John Wild.
Don: Would John do it?
Francois: No. John says it’s not that complicated.
Don: It’s a time sink.
Bruce: What about the idea of posting a billboard near the entry to the road with the names of the scofflaws – as they do at the St. Francis Yacht Club.
Don: I like the idea of sending a letter, “we’re going to take you to small claims.”
Tom: I wish I had more of the peoples’ phone numbers. Half the time when I call, people say, “oh, I thought I sent my payment.”
Fall/winter road work
Tom: Fall / winter work? Any to discuss? We need to get Steve going.
Francois: I’ll talk to Gasaway. We’re going to arrange work on Big Meadow at our expense. I’ll take care of that. I’ll contact Bird or Titus.
Bruce: Colin gave a pitch for how much we could profit by going for his $950 proposed consultation regarding better road practices. I told him I don’t think we have the money this year.
Francois: Let’s get our revenues up first.
Tom: Colin apparently billed us less than the $3500 we expected. (discussion) He hasn’t billed for appearing at the meeting.
Tom: Paul, it’s your show.
Paul: It’s very complicated! Here are “fun facts.”
(see accompanying documents for greater detail.)
The upper road is 10.86 miles. Its full length including portions we do not maintain per the by-laws is just over 13 miles. Clow is 8.1 miles.
The upper road includes six mains roads. But I divided each of the roads into sections. I’ve got Nash Mill A, B, C, D, E and F.
.9 mile is supported by only one owner. Deleting Glaus means there is .7 mile for which only Plowright is responsible. Seekins has .2 mile only he is responsible for. 4.16 miles are supported by 4 or fewer owners.
One of the reasons Clow it so good is we have only two road ends. Upper has 8 road ends – or it depends how you count.
Clow has a minimum of 5 owners supporting its two ends. Turns out that 2.1 miles are accessed only by non-residents (i.e. part-time residents)
We have 51 total invoice-ees, 46 of whom are being invoiced. Five have never been billed.
Tom: I want to get those five peoples’ names.
Paul: Hightower, Simons, Seidel/Kurokawa - the one you call “Lascic”…I guess it’s only four.
Paul: First I modeled the current fee structure. $56.30 per mile “is a load of rock every six years.” But folks expect a perfect road. It’s flawed logic.
Average funding is $2000 / mile for Clow. But we don’t apply the money uniformly. We spend it according to need. Your average per mile is about 60% of what Clow spends. Clow has never suffered for money.
Bruce: You’re lucky enough to have a road that is uniformly heavily used. We have a mix.
Paul: John Wild realized way back that there was not going to be enough money. The outlying people don’t pay enough (i.e. a fair share.) The extra parcel tax raises little. $1080. And how do you allocate that extra-parcel income?
Tom: It was just a way of getting more money.
Bruce: That event of its passage is in the minutes. I emailed you the reference.
Francois: Paul pointed out, there are two kinds of extra parcels: adjacent and non-adjacent.
Paul: For example, __X__ gets billed for two though she owns three parcels.
Paul: The overhead to run the upper road system is about $3000, about $60 per person. How do you allocate that extra money that people are paying? My model makes it go away. $60 base; the overpay goes for Joy and for insurance.
Paul: Correlating, and correlating, and re-checking …there are about 30 different versions of the spreadsheet. It’s like a transmission. If you move any one of these related tables and logics, all these other guys move accordingly. (Recalls conversations between himself and Francois, anecdotes about his insights and iterations, and sees he’s losing us.)
…”It’s gotta be a data guy thing!”
Francois: We spent a lot of time figuring out each of the parcels, and looking in Google Earth and the fire dept. database; we drove around to see how owners got into their parcel… that’s how we determined the five non-billed parcels.
Bruce: Could you tell whether they have any structures at all?
Francois: It looks like there are structures.
Bruce: We haven’t heard the specific proposal as yet, have we? I thought maybe it blew right past me.
Paul: May I take another couple minutes... The database kicks out four different files that include the 15 sections, data about the ownership... The 1086 ownership segments are listed in the spreadsheet. Number of resident /non-resident, fees paid.
There are 39 different combinations of upper/lower road payers, so 39 mileage rates are in the model. There’s a 15,000 data point table, listing every ownership and every segment that that ownership travels through. This enabled me to run a “tree” to sum all the increments of everyone’s use. O.K., now let’s get into the Excel modeler…
Francois: We decided to leave out Gimblett’s road, we stopped at the fork from Beahm to Bramble; we stopped on Chemise ridge. we took out the part from Schock to Kobler, did include Seekins, did include Bramble. We stopped at the pond. In the final models we included the road to Gimblett/ Maruna intersection. We excluded the road going to Kobler’s through the Schock property with permission from the Koblers. There are decisions we could do differently.
Tom: You stopped at Rudovsky. Where’s Lang? Francois: We’ve never done that portion.
Tom: Lang bought the property in the 60’s. She says Wilbur promised to clear up to her well. She showed me a picture of Wilbur with his jeep and his little dog.
Bruce: Do you have the picture? I’ll scan it and put it on the website. For 15 years I’ve been trying to get my hands on any old picture…
Paul: The database knows about Quickbooks. So the database can calculate using the Quickbooks logic what the bill is. This is a design feature: all the modeling happens in Excel. It’s all very visible in queries and tables. There’s no code, no hidden wizard stuff. A skilled Excel user can run the model.
It allows per-segment adjustment at the 1/100 mile level. (52.8 feet) You generally don’t want to manipulate individual segments but it’s possible.
Yearly per-mile budget and the rates are calculated based on the “payer units.” “Payer units” = number of non-residents + number of residents x “the residential factor.” The resident/non-resident factor has historically been 1.5. Francois and I think, don’t mess with this. About 1/3 are residents. It may be more. (i.e., residents listed as non-residents.)
Francois: I think, where doubt, assume “resident.” Let them prove they aren’t. We probably should increase the factor. Residents should probably pay more. But at this point best just leave it.
Don: I don’t know why we could not impose an agricultural charge…
Tom: Why it won’t work is, all the dope growers are “under the radar.” And where do you draw the line? Some people may be growing five plants.
Francois: Your fee is based on how many of these sections you drive through…
Paul: …and how many people are on those sections to share the cost. On this diagram (points) the wider it is the more people there are.
If we were to do a chart that shows the per-mile fee, this would be very narrow here (points) because many people pay but this would be wide here (points.)
It comes with a nomenclature. “Budget target” means, the estimated per-mile cost to maintain that section of road . Budget targets vary from $ 666 per mile to $4000 per mile. I made that up, based on my maintenance experience. The $667 is for those roads that have non-residents. The $4000 is for those roads up to the Big Meadow turnoff.
Don: If we have adjustments to expenses such as overhead do we have to re-visit this every year?
Paul: We should not have to revisit it yearly. Maybe every 2 or 3 years there could be some adjustment. I’ve got about 130 hours into this right now. This model heeds everything. This packet is designed so everybody will understand and come to a conclusion.
Francois: We’re also increasing the overall income.
“We’re also increasing overall income.”
Paul: You have a budget, and a number of payer units. Divide the payer units into the budget. You’ve got a $1000 per mile stretch, and 20 paying into it, that gives you a rate of $50 / mile.
You all got this four-page proposal. Francois did this nice chart. If you have specific questions we can go through it.
Don: This does not include the Lower Road fee?
Paul: It’s in the “total fee” table.
Don: Then the “change” column only reflects upper road change?
Paul: You got way ahead of me again. These questions would be unnecessary if you had a full understanding of this.
Francois: The upper road part you paid in the past compared to the upper road fee now.
Tom: Hope Lang goes up $220.
Francois: The worst is Doug and Judy. Theirs goes up $396. Or Diane Casey: $466.
Paul: Spinardi here pays $156 per year less. Don goes down some $27. Francois goes up two hundred some. It varies. We’re shifting the cost to the people who own and use the long and little-used segments.
(The board members study the list.)
Bruce: One of the assumptions in this I am trying to identify: all the segments we maintain will be maintained to a level higher than now?
Paul: Not necessarily. We’re going to tell them what they get.
Don: The assumption is we’re going to rock the entire system over an interval of time?
Paul: Everybody is entitled to “365 2-wheel drive safe and comfortable access.” You can’t expect to have a “lower-road quality” all the way back to Scott Homestead. We also made political judgments along the way. One is: piss off as few people as possible. (This means: don’t omit difficult spots.)
Don: These people (indicates on diagram) may not need that much rock. If we had to explain this…
Paul: It’s “365 2-wheel drive safe and comfortable access.” Francois put in, over my objection, the word “comfortable.”
Bruce: Need to define comfortable.
Francois: Few ruts, few potholes.
Bruce: In terms of people accepting the authority of this, particularly those who are going to be paying more, it’s hard to tell them to submit to this incredibly sophisticated spreadsheet and collection of database tables just because it’s so smart. Is it possible to express peoples’ charges in a more simple way?
Paul: If you all hadn’t gotten ahead of me…
Bruce: Well, you’re taking a long time! I think we get your preamble.
Paul: See this list which has the two yellow lines across the bottom? My proposal is when you send their new bill you send along this list so you see exactly how their bill is calculated.
Francois: So I’m paying from Clow to Little Mill Creek, then to Big Meadow Road, then four segments along Big Meadow…
Don: Are these parcel driveways or accesses which divide these segments?
Paul: Notice that as the number of users goes down, the per-mile for the section of road goes up.
Bruce: I think I get the idea. What’s the overall increment income target?
Paul: That’s the very next sheet I was coming to.
Bruce: The copy of this diagram I put onto the web was a little bigger than this print, so it’s more legible.
Francois, Don: This diagram is on the web?!
(Board harangues Bruce for several minutes for posting the diagram on the web)
Bruce: I posted it for the sake of improving public understanding. Someone with patience can study it and get informed.
All: We haven’t approved this yet!
Bruce: Nothing says it’s approved! It simply illustrates the dilemma of funding the road maintenance.
Paul: (explains the rationale for the total income increment.) This shows and lists the 39 different stretches which have different mileage rates. At the top the rate is $70 per mile; at the bottom, $711 / mile. Seekins rate for that .2 mile is $1067.
Don: Getting back to the map – what if owners with high per-mile rates elect to take segments off maintenance – “opt out?”
Paul: Yes, we lose X revenue but we’re relieved of X expense.
Don: Say, we lose $500 in revenue. If several do this, we lose thousands in revenue.
Paul: But we lose big expenses as well. So the total budget goes down.
Francois: But Seekins maintains his road anyway.
Tom: There are so many roads that have been improved already; those need not be in the system.
Francois: We way over-spent on Chemise Ridge.
Tom: I agree.
Bruce: But we won’t do more on those segments for maybe 10 years.
Tom: I’m thinking how to present this to make it more palatable. Some of the remote people may say “I’m not going to pay more, I’ll just maintain myself.”
Paul: If you and all those who share your section want to opt-out, you can opt out.
Francois: But the trick is to get everybody on your segment to opt out. You can’t opt out if you have other people using your segment. The road association is not going to organize that.
Bruce: Yes, that burden is on them.
The beauty of this is, we can really quantify what it means to opt out.
Paul: Unlike the current system, this makes clear how to allocate the maintenance money.
Francois: This chart shows the length of the road. It shows the revenue for each section. For example, Little Mill Creek is long and you’ve got tiny revenue. It’s worse for Bill Seekins and Bramble.
Don: Do we allow people to opt back in?
Tom: There you go!
Bruce: After a few years, their road is trashed, they say “I want back in!”
Francois: Once you opt out, you’re out.
Tom: If opt-out and then wish to opt back in…
Francois: They must bring the road back to the standard – the quality it was then they opted out.
Don: Also need to think about change of ownership. They opt out, then sell their parcel…
Francois: There will have to be an enforced arrangement to bring the road back up to standard. Maybe we don’t do the opt-out. Maybe it’s too complicated.
Paul: We bank the amounts accrued per segment until we have enough money and time to execute the maintenance needed on that segment.
Tom: Why you should not opt out: say we accumulate $1600 to spend on X stretch of road shared by one or a couple residents. We can ask them “how do you want this money spent?” How is that different than them opting out and having to spend roughly the same amount? We can probably get the work done more cheaply.
Bruce: This model does not take into account usage. The resident/non-resident factor is a crude way to get at usage. But it doesn’t begin to touch the actual discrepancy. There are people with five residences on their parcel.
Francois: We’ve gone around and around about that. It’s kind of hard to figure that out. Mileage is less subjective.
Bruce: The extra parcel fee is out, right?
Francois: We make an executive decision about where to stop the maintenance. Determine what segments we cut off.
Tom: Say we’re dinging a remote person a high amount, he pays and says “I want my road graded right now.”
Don: So when we explain this it has to be tied to a maintenance schedule.
Bruce: And it has to be more aggressive than the one we presented so far. It can be similar, but we have to make the repeat cycle shorter.
Bruce: I don’t think we should prune the road network by opt-out, other than those segments you proposed to leave off. First we should try to get people to pay, without proposing they delete their road segment from the system.
Tom: I think we should ratchet it – don’t roll in the full amount at first.
“Just raising the per-mile rate is not fair”
Paul: The original billing system is fatally flawed.
Bruce: Sure, it’s just something John thought up. It was a first cut.
Francois: When I described this to John he said “this is way too complicated. I devised the original system in a couple of hours.”
Paul: This required real work, John.
Bruce: There will be some push-back just because of its complexity.
Tom: I don’t think we can simplistically raise rates by an across the board 10% or 25% say – because we still have the problem that the people in the outlying areas are not paying their fair share. That’s our big problem. I think this is kind-of a fair way of doing it.
Francois: I think this is a fair way.
Paul: Just raising the per-mile rate is not fair.
Bruce: Though the details are beyond our comprehension --
Paul: The details are beyond my comprehension!
Bruce: The people who have three miles of road for their private use ought to be paying more.
Don: Holmes Ranch is flat fee.
Bruce: I can’t believe nobody on Holmes Ranch disputes that.
Francois: They have a charter that we don’t have. It might be built in that.
Bruce: If we implement this, we may be emulated throughout the valley.
Tom: Paul may get hired.
Paul: That’s right! $800 / hr.!
Tom: How much do we currently bring in?
Paul: $18,000 - $19,000 That’s just upper road.
Don: So we’re going up five grand.
Paul: Here’s my political concern about incremental small increases. You raise expectations by nickel and diming and fail to deliver the expected improvement. Any extra little way to get money probably isn’t worth the headaches. People are going to complain regardless of how much or how little we increase their bill.
Francois: The “safe and comfortable 365” does not include capital investment such as culverts that need to be replaced.
Don: In previous years we spent upward of $15k or $19k. Does that include culvert replacement?
Tom: $19k. Yes.
Don: So culvert replacement is not a maintenance item.
Tom: The first two years we had $19,000 to spend on the road. Some of that was carried over from previous years – maybe $3000. This year I used a budget figure of $13,500 which includes the overhead. So take out the overhead and that leaves $9000. (After long discussion…)
Bruce: That’s a big jump!
Tom: That’s some 35 percent.
Paul: It about matches the level of Clow spending. Your level has been way below Clow.
Verdict
Francois: So where do you want to go with this?
Paul: Do you want to adopt this philosophy or not?
Bruce: I think it’s wonderful. But it still embraces a couple gigantic crude assumptions like the resident/non-resident factor. It takes far more into account than does the original billing system.
Don: Our verdict then? Votes to “accept?”
Bruce: We can continue talking about this on-line.
Bruce: Because this is such a big change, do we just present it to everyone this year as a proposal and not yet alter everyone’s billing? People need a while to digest this?
Francois: We want money now!
Don: I like the idea of phasing it in, a stepped approach. Also get resident buy-in on whether they’re going to opt out.
Tom: My idea is to meet with the most affected long-time residents.
Bruce: I think that’s good. If they buy it, we’re in.
Don: The people impacted 10% or less, we’re not going to hear from.
Paul: There are 10 people who are increased $190 or more.
Bruce: That’s a good number. You could potentially meet with them all.
Don: Philosophically, I love it. But we have a lot of work to do.
Paul: It’s going to be vastly simplified when we present it.
Tom: Francois’s diagram explains it well.
Francois: I need help to find it on the website.
Bruce: I need to know why it’s so hard for people to find things on the website.
Tom: What’s the next thing?
Bruce: I think that’s the most practical next thing. We send them a package in advance that explains. This can’t be fully absorbed by one serving.
Don, Paul: I would be very cautious about sending anything. It’s going to spread like wildfire.
Don: We need Tom to put together a three year plan and let us know if this number is right.
Tom: Every need I know is on here (points to his budget.) It extends to 2016. I can do a pertinent budget and a plan. This is almost it.
Don: If we did this, within two years would we be able to execute your whole maintenance program?
Tom: Yes, we can do a lot.
Bruce: While you’re sitting in the “God” chair for once in a generation, you could skew this. Shift the burden a little to the close-in people like me paying less who could pay a little more so the out-lying people don’t take such a hit. It’s a little socialistic.
Try 10% say.
Paul: I call it “redistributive.” I have the power to do it by the algorithm.
Francois: We could just increase the base fee.
Paul: But how do you allocate that increased base fee, over the whole system?
The $52/mile that everyone’s paying spread evenly I think is not defensible. People down low are paying for people at the ends with their high base fee.
This is an enormously clean proposal. There’s no question of the fairness.
Bruce: So why don’t we meet with people and show this version rather than waiting until it is further tweaked.
Tom: A “town-hall” meeting?
Bruce: It’s called “house meeting.”
Don: Small groups. 10 is the max.
Bruce: You won’t be able to coincide that many.
Don: Let’s take one or two we know we can talk to.
Bruce: More than that.
Francois: Is this to encourage people to drop out?
Bruce:
Oh no, we don’t want people to drop out. We want to preserve
the union.
Paul: The idea of opt-out was so folks like Seekins and Plowright have an alternative.
Francois: One group I could see talking to about the dropping out option is Seekins, Bramble, Beahm. They’re all served from that branch. Another is Plowright. Another group is Chemise Ridge.
Don: Bruce, if we change the fee structure based on the map, is that an amendment to the bylaws?
Bruce: The by-laws have been changed in the past. It’s in the minutes.
Don: The map defines the voting membership, not the fee.
Francois: The fees are decided by the board, says the bylaws.
Paul: I say, we move forward gently.
Tom: Get a meeting of the most board-friendly people. We then progress to the more difficult people.
(More talk about house meetings.)
Don: Can Joy run us pro-forma invoices?
Bruce: Total bill figures are good enough.
Paul: We should start our argument with the flaws in the current system. Then explain the philosophy of the new approach.
Francois: Final topic: who’s going to talk to Miriam to tell her that her property is going to wash away.
Bruce: I’m not going to tell her that her property is going to wash away because I don’t believe it. If the government thinks the benefit is worth this cost, I’ll try to persuade her.
Paul: You can’t find the money without getting her permission.
Paul: We’ve been told by Fish and Game that we can get the money.
(The meeting dissolves as board members help Tom move a heavy table.)
Adjourned at 1:21