Anthem Council asks for community input

MARC BUCKHOUT ~ MANAGING EDITOR ~ 6/29/2011

Silence isn’t golden, at least according to the Anthem Community Council.
Just as Pink Floyd pondered, “Is there’s anybody out there,” members on the board want to know where members of the community stand.
For the last couple of months a Governing Document Review Group has been examining the restructuring of the Anthem bylaws under which residents of Anthem would become members, giving them the opportunity to vote on a yet to be determined scope of items.
Among a number of issues to be ironed out include what that scope would include, whether home owners would be the lone members or if business owners also would be voting members. The group also is looking at whether the Anthem Community Council should continue in its current form with three members representing Parkside, three members representing Country Club and one representing The Villages.
While the council will ultimately make the decisions on how the governing documents are changed the group, including board members Jeff Pointer, vice president Bob Copen and president Craig Boates had hoped that they’d receive more input from the public whether in person at the work sessions or through email.
“We think we ought to change our governing documents so we give the community rights to have a say in their own destiny,” Pointer said. “We have received some input from the community, but to be frank it hasn’t been anywhere near the feedback we’d like to have.”
Former board president Donna Gloshen said the board would serve the community
well by leaving the current setup in place.
“It’s the same few of us that show up to every meeting. That should give you some clue about the interest level,” she said. “Giving voting rights to members of our community that obviously aren’t paying attention scares the daylights out of me. I want people that understand what’s going on impacting our community. To give a vote to uninformed people that don’t bother to be active, that don’t have a clue, I think it’s dangerous. I would rather you as a board, people that pay attention at the meetings, who have the ability to be informed by staff, make the decisions.”
Boates said the board’s intent isn’t to bring the community into the decision making process for day-to-day operations, but to have their voice heard on bigger, more financially impactful decisions.
“There’s a happy medium we’re looking to find,” he said. “We never had the intention to go to the residents to vote on everything, but for big expense items it would seem resident should have the right to vote.”
Boates acknowledges that he has had some moments of doubt as to whether the review process is worthwhile.
“I’ve had some of the same feelings, the why am I doing all this work when nobody seems to care,” he said. “What I realized and what I keep coming back to is I believe this is what’s best for the community. If giving people some say is what’s best for the community then it should be worth our time to examine our bylaws.”
Pointer said the consensus of the little input the board has received has been one of caution.
“The message is we should give ourselves some latitude for operating,” he said. “The thought is we can’t paralyze ourselves by requiring that 2/3 of the residents must approve a measure for it to go into place. Our inclination is that when we put things to vote we’d be looking for 51 percent of the votes cast in favor of an item so we don’t get boxed into a corner and can’t get anything done.”
The board said no decisions are imminent, indicating they are still wrestling with issues and would still like to have a better feel for what the community wants. The board also questioned whether area residents have enough information to have a feel for what they want.
To contact the Anthem Community Council email jkollings@anthemcouncil.com or call 623-742-6050.