Life in Sea Pines is showing a number of signs indicating that we’ve turned the corner from the seasonal cold of winter to the milder and (thanks to the many flowering bushes and trees) beautiful days of Spring. And preparation is well underway for the RBC Heritage Golf tournament that will again bring a national spotlight to our community next month.
March has been a very busy time for all of our Sea Pines CSA Board Committees, each of which met to review last year’s Board accomplishments and Board established goals that our committees will be addressing in the coming months. At our Board of Directors meeting next Tuesday (which can be viewed beginning at 10 a.m. at www.SeaPinesLiving.com/live), you will hear updates from our Senior Sea Pines CSA Staff Members and Board Committee chairs on their work over the last several months.
As I hope you will recall, at our November 2021 meeting, the Board agreed to continue researching several of the Revenue Task Force’s recommendations for new sources of potential revenue that could meet our community’s growing needs for additional security, maintenance and operating expenses, as well as additional capital to address needs such as gate reconfiguration for traffic management that are not covered by the Critical Infrastructure funding that was overwhelmingly approved by referendum last year. Although that additional assessment remains tied up in litigation, we remain optimistic for a positive outcome that will allow us to collect the Critical Infrastructure assessment sometime this year. The Revenue Task Force recommendations are instead designed to meet the operating needs of the community that cannot be satisfied with our annual assessment. Because the 1974 Covenants limit increases to that assessment to an unrealistic CPI adjustment, that assessment level is simply not keeping up with the real costs of operations in Sea Pines. Your Board is committed to assuring that we meet these operational challenges for the short and long term, to assure that we can maintain a safe and secure community and to ensure the highest quality of life in Sea Pines that our property owners and visitors have all come to expect.
In furtherance of the Board’s consideration of these recommendations, our senior staff have been working tirelessly since the November Board Meeting to provide data which will demonstrate where additional expenses are being incurred, and also demonstrate some of the main drivers of those expenses. I have asked the staff to present to the Board the product of their work at our meeting next week. I am sure this will be extremely helpful to the Board and the Sea Pines community; we must continue to pursue the additional revenues necessary to meet the significant challenges created as the occupancy of our community continues to grow with more visitors and residents alike. And we will continue to focus at this time on raising the revenues from the visitors and renters who are the primary drivers of those additional needs – with all of our property owners paying their share through the annual assessment process.
I hope you will take the time to watch the Board meeting, either on the livestream or sometime later when it is made available on YouTube. I believe the information that will be presented will be extremely useful in allowing our community to understand the needs that we are seeking to resolve and reasonable resources we are seeking to tap.
As always, I welcome your comments and questions at Chairman@csaseapines.com.
Regards,
