General Manager's Update

By Shari Haldeman - sharih@landings.org
General Manager/COO

Dear Landings Association Members,

During the September Board meeting, Comcast/Xfinity representatives gave a status report on a series of issues recently presented to them by TLA staff, including service disruptions, outages, customer service, and unburied cables. Tim Rabdau, Senior Director Xfinity Communities, advised that their team resolved the August service disruptions by replacing a node, as well as repairing two fiber line cuts, and also identified process improvements they are implementing at The Landings. The Xfinity team described a network enhancement underway to create redundancy in the system in the event of a problem with the primary fiber cable. A secondary fiber path will be installed from their main facility off-island to the causeway and onto the island to provide the ability to switch to this alternate fiber and reduce the potential that any single event will disrupt service. In addition, the technical team reported that an audit of the temporary subscriber cable drops identified 19 locations where drops required burial. Six burials were completed in the last week of September and will continue until all have been resolved. Comcast/Xfinity also advised that they are dedicating two 24/7 Technicians to work exclusively in The Landings to address service and installation issues.

Time is running out to vote for three candidates to The Landings Association’s Board of Directors. All owners should have received voting packets by now, that include instructions on how to vote online or via the included paper ballot. This is your chance to have a say in who helps lead our community into the future.

In September, the Finance Committee Budget Liaisons reported back on their reviews of draft department budgets. These Liaisons play an invaluable role in challenging assumptions and ensuring proper levels of budgeting are achieved to provide desired services as well as infrastructure replacement. The Finance Committee’s Reserves Subcommittee and staff will be meeting over the next several weeks for reviews of the Capital Reserve Fund. Increased materials costs due to inflation and supply chain pressures have had an adverse impact on our Capital Reserves Fund. We also have experienced more failures to infrastructure such as with 30-year-old corrugated metal storm drains. Therefore, it remains vitally important to streamline operational expenditures and increase non-Assessment revenues where possible. Over the next two months, the Finance Committee and Board will conduct final reviews of the draft 2022 Budget in preparation for final budget adoption in December. As always, the comprehensive Budget Book will be placed on our website once this process is completed.

One of the many projects under review for budget planning is the replacement of the Tidewater Square roadway, which is currently scheduled in the Capital Reserves Fund for 2022. The engineer’s estimate for “like for like” replacement of this brick section of roadway with pavers is $733,231. Due to the magnitude of the cost for this single project, staff began the obligatory process of evaluating various design options for discussion with the Public Works Committee. This process inevitably generates a universe of design concepts to ensure diligence prior to developing a recommendation that will have a lasting impact. At present, staff are continuing thorough scrutiny before a recommendation is made to the Board of Directors.

Work continues on finalizing the new Strategic Plan. Staff have put together high-level plans for several dozen action steps and provided them to the Board for first review at a workshop session in October. Much of the feedback received from residents has been incorporated into the draft document. Many items will require follow-up review and action by our Board and standing committees, such as Governance and Public Works. The goal is to finalize the Strategic Plan draft and action plans by the end of this year, so work to implement the action steps can begin in earnest at the beginning of next year.

Finally, thanks to all who provided valuable feedback to the draft updates to our Private Property Maintenance Standards (PPMS). Many suggestions were incorporated into the document by staff and approved by the Governance Committee, and then the Board at the September Board Meeting. As with all such documents, you can review the PPMS at www.landings.org/resources > Governing Documents or click here.



This article was originally published by The Landings Association on their website.

Visit landings.org to read the original article.
https://landings.org/news/2021/09/29/general-managers-update