The Wall and beyond….

This is a general response to some of the comments seen on ND concerning the Seawall, RFP process and future endeavors

9 years were wasted in part due to charlatans telling this community how to fix a seawall, when in reality they were bilking us for a couple million, while they changed their own design 3 times, on the fly, and required a test site for one of the options they testified under oath, would work!!!  (Really?)

Thus all board members, past and present, where stuck trying to sift through the constant barrage of changes, double talk, and confusing drawings (that changed to suit their latest presentation), trying to make sense of it.

Thankfully the test site was an utter failure with 2 other gov’t agencies now investigating that engineering debacle. I say thankfully b/c finally this board HAD to go another direction and that was the RFP process.  With the investigation into them along with their failure, the charlatans high tailed it out of here, and the burden of approximately $70k a month on this community went away.

This board brought in a reputable Engineering firm, Cardno, and they took over and corrected the many flaws in that wall design for the emergency repairs.  The RFP process did not go as is typical in the gov’t contracting world, however that process eventually provided this community with 3 bidders.  Those 3 designs were similar in nature (you can only build a wall so many ways) but were far superior to the Langan design that Cardno signed off on.  Plus all 3 were far less expensive.

This board went through tons of reports with Cardno, and the 3 bidders, going over all aspects of their designs, but this time we had an Engineering firm working for us and not their bottom line to line their pockets.

We are not done with the wall, we have just begun, my focus and probably my colleagues focus is still on the wall. We have more to do to bring this to fruition.  It is imperative we don’t financially burden ourselves further until we get this project well into production. Last thing we need to do is unknowingly/inadvertently or even on purpose, saddle ourselves with more debt before we know if there are any pitfalls (that all gov’t contracts always seem to produce) with the wall.

Once we get this task well into production will be the time to look at more improvements for Mira Bay, b/c we can’t just write a check for these improvements and ‘hope” it’s covered knowing there will be other issues that seem to always arise (not just the wall).

We also need to look at these developers, whose whole purpose is profit, that profit should come with a cost to them NOT the residents paying for these amenity improvements so they can bolster their sales.

We have a lot of work to do going forward, but we must be smart about it. That means we should make sure the wall is well underway, have a realistic short term plan, and then a long term plan that includes these developers contributing to the community to help themselves.  We also need to keep in mind every single amenity we add has a long term cost for maintenance and eventually replacement for some that has to be added to the bottom line.