$99,499.00
-- Security... that's @ $8200/month. It
was actually higher before the Board scrapped its contracts
with security firms and went to the "property
attendant" concept.
$150,000.00--
Cable TV... which comes to about $21/month per owner. This
is about 50% of what we would have to pay on our own.
However, maybe we can renegotiate this, or get them to
include HBO as they have at Desert Princess and other
places. In my opinion, the CATV
deal is a good one. Yes, perhaps it could be improved,
but it's still a good deal for owners.
$201,000.00--
For the "non-exclusive use of the clubhouse"
--with about 30 more years to run. Someone ought to go to
jail for agreeing to this one! Any lawyers in the
house that want to work on a contingency fee??? Good
luck with this issue. It was written into the deal
from day one, and if there's one issue that every faction at
Mesquite is in agreement on, it's this one. Everyone
wants out of this arrangement, but even if the HOA were to
eventually buy the golf course and remove the payments we
are now making, that revenue would have to be made up from
other sources, which would mean marketing the golf course
and clubhouse facilities in a way to generate more revenue
than it has ever generated in the past. This is a
tough problem, to say the least, and I honestly don't know
what the best solution is. But it's not an issue unique
to Mesquite. Almost every club in the desert has some
arrangement by which the homeowners subsidize the golf
course, whether it is a direct payment such as this one to a
plan that requires members to eat $500 worth of food in the
clubhouse restaurant each year, or something similar that
works out to be a subsidy in one way, shape, or form.
If you can get us out from under that lease, however, you'd
be a real hero. It may be worth a try, but it's a real
longshot.
$527,429.00
-- Landscaping, which seems to increase lately as we
decrease the flowers and plantings. Another area that needs
specific review. One of the
issues is that as the landscaping matures, it requires more
trimming. This is particularly true of the trees, which are
much bigger than they ever were before and need more TLC,
all of which translates into higher costs. A better way to
frame the issue might not be an examination of landscape
cost increases, but how much higher these costs would have
been without going to drought tolerant, desert scapes.
