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| From: | SP52948 owner |
|---|---|
| To: | Peter Bone BCS Strata Management, Thomas Karolewski |
| CC: | John Fry BCS Strata Management, Bill Young, Gerald Raichman, John Ward, Maureen McDonald, Stan Pogorelsky, Upali Aranwela |
| Subject: | Re: Draft letter to owners regarding General Meeting, Lease and Sinking Fund Levies |
| Date: | 31/7/10, 7:33 pm |
On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 23:07 +1000, committee chairperson Bruce Copland wrote:
Dear John,
We need to agree a General Meeting Date, the formal notice and the amended form of motion. I also want the proxy form to have a clear tick yes or no on the lease issue.
Will you please draft and forward to me the required correspondence with owners including all attachments.
The attached draft letter sets out the general position regarding levies and some background on the lease and electricity supply issue. I invite comments on my letter if I have any facts wrong. I will finalise this once all other forms are prepared.
All committee members should note that these numbers are my estimates assuming we can slow projects sufficiently to spread the recovery of the electrical repairs and upgrade over four years. Members should be aware final tenders and approvals are not yet in hand and the amounts are not certain.
Hello team,
Firstly, I apologize for not replying sooner. I was in New Zealand on business whole week and just got back. Coincidentally, I will have to go there for another week in mid-August. If anyone needs my attention while I am away, here are better email addresses (I do not read email from my home email server when I am away)...
Many thanks for the draft and the effort to create it. The second part I support in full as we need to forewarn the owners of the future costs, but..
a) I am not able to approve the first part of it as lot of information that the owners SHOULD and NEED to have to make an informed decision are missing.
Firstly, I do not see any mention what we considered about Optus at the meeting. Owners are seemingly in the dark and without a single piece of data that goes against their proposal. Not fair to people in the complex.
Before I go any further, I need to explain how I vote in Federal and State elections.
Firstly, I never listen what politicians say or promise. I test and verify their actions and past results... At the time of voting, I assume the role of a Director of the Board at a company called Australia. I am one of 17-odd million directors (those that can vote legally). There are two candidates for a CEO's position in MY COMPANY (I pay around 45% tax so I have massive right to check the people that I pay to work for me and my "employees" - people of Australia). I look at the two candidates and find them to be equally miserable, selfish, incompetent, and dangerous for the well-being of the company (Australia). So, I fail both of them. Simple, and no questions asked. No bad feelings, just a business matter. In short, I have never ever voted Labor or Liberal. I would be more than happy to give them a vote if they deserved it. How others vote - that does not interest me. That is their freedom of choice. Most of people vote without learning from the past experiences though. Some people even vote certain way because their grandfather did it, or their nationality has always favored certain party no matter what, and so on. When I came to Australia as a new migrant I met one of the descendants of the Captain Cook in Queensland (my friend's family was one of the earliest white settlers in Australia). I asked him about differences between Labor and Liberal and he said this to me:
Both start with letter "L" and one name is longer
Now back to serious business.
I think we have duty of care and moral obligation to present more details before asking anyone to make such an important decision. We are not politicians who carefully craft messages to conveniently avoid mentioning what hurts them.
We were voted to represent the owners with our best abilities and without any hidden agendas. At least, that is how I look at my role. For example, if I wanted to be selfish, I could say that I do not care about antennas (or antennae) in Block C because I am not facing them, or I do not care if the lift maintenance is bad because I live on second floor and I am in good health and do not care about old people with pacemakers and bad legs, and so on. But, I do care and do think about everybody! I never looked solely at my own benefits and was only too happy to see all parts of our complex looking great.
What the draft fails to mention are "minor" details:
That the Optus' offer is well below the market rates (I have proof from three sources, that 3% per-year raise in Optus rent is not valid for businesses in this region, that Optus threatened us they were not going to increase their offer significantly - John confirmed it clearly enough at the meeting, information that CPI is not 3%, as you, EC members, in the same letter mentioned much higher average raise in cost of electricity, gas and water, the fact that many other renown bodies say different things about radiation - for example World Health Organization, Optus did not submit decent plan of project yet, that each owner "saves" around 100 dollars per year with Optus deal, but will spend around 15-20% more due to other problems and rising costs in the complex, that Optus itself does not have many antennas on their roofs at North Ryde! And so on.
For everybody's sake, may I remind everyone the following facts about the famous 20,000 dollars offer:
a) Even Gerard's bowling club makes around 27,000 dollars per year in a similar deal (and their office position is much less attractive than ours).
b) An owner in our complex, who runs a very big business and has office space in Eastwood was also approached by Optus for a a similar deal, but Optus OFFERED HIM MUCH HIGHER PRICE. If anyone doubt me, I can provide the details. Of course, the owner kindly declined Optus' offer (he is in profession that deals with health and knows too well the risks).
c) That Optus is more than welcome to ask businesses just opposite M2 motorway to install antennas on their roofs. And how come they do not do it!
I think we do not need to rush about this unless we post more details, for example, on the notice boards in each building, and let owners digest the information in a fair fashion. If we want them to vote around 14th of August, than let's display some information on notice boards two weeks beforehand (straight on Monday next week, 2nd of August)).
I duly note that an information about government's proof that radiation is not dangerous was mentioned but there is not a single piece of information to show the opposite (to let owners make up their mind). So, the message looked a bit biased towards Optus.
And who is to say that the government is right? They are the same people that claim that our involvement in war in Iraq and Afghanistan is good for us (hint, how many politicians' sons and daughters are in the war and how well are our borders protected?), claim that we have excellent public health system (hint: we do not, I know - I have been in over 45 countries and lived in five of them), claim that we have second-to-none educational system, that selling raw materials is good for us (since we have nothing else to sell), claim that having 35 million people in Australia is good, that Sydney's roads and traffic is great, and many others).
In short, I do not listen to anyone who just talks. I check and verify.
I am a bit saddened that since our meeting nobody gave me any information that showed what I had said was wrong or incorrect. I would be happy to stand corrected. And I would be happy to make money on Optus deal and be filthy rich through them :) But I (and you) cannot even make enough money to pay for a decent dinner for two in any restaurant with what Optus gives us.
A error in the draft letter:
"A diagram showing the approximate sixe and location is attached."
should be
"A diagram showing the approximate site and location is attached."
I actually have two major proposals to save money, in much larger amounts than what Optus' pitiful deal might achieve. Before I present them, I will do full mathematics, pros-and-cons. Just for your sake, here is what I am thinking about:
a) In each building, in the stairs area, there are 17 fluorescent lights, each around 35-40 watts. They are switched on 24 hours a day, 265 days a year. In other words:
4 buildings x 17 lights x 35 watts each x 24 hours x 365 days
And multiply that by the price of KWh...
How many people use the stairs - very few! If we set up motion detectors, or simple switches on each floor and then set auto-off if there is nobody on the stairs, we could save decent amount of money.
I would not suggest to use motion detectors in foyers or on the floors, due to high number of connections and disconnections (light bulbs would have to be changed more often).
b) How much did we benefit from manned security after 10pm in last 12-13 years? Hmm, not too much. How many crooks were captured - none. How many garages robbed and property stolen - too much. I am thinking about the following:
Cut the hours of security guards to around 11pm. That would save around 20-30 thousand dollars per year (maybe even more). The fire doors are now alarmed and I would do the same after, say, 11pm for the rubbish area (how many people need to dump rubbish at midnight?). Than, negotiate back-to-base monitoring (there are many security companies that could do it). Their cost is much lower and we could negotiate the time-to-respond-at-site in case of emergency (typically, 15-20 minutes for the corporations and businesses).
Anyway, before I do the full maths, I do not intend to propose it. I want to give full specs to everybody so that people can think for themselves.
In short, Optus is not our last chance, nor are they our friends. If they can "wait" for about a year till we get our electrical supply sorted out, why the rush now? Who is pushing for it?
Cheers,