SCA Info
PARADISE LOST: THE SUN CITY ANTHEM STORY
Despite the well received public relations efforts by George Meese in The Villages of Sun City Anthem publication that's mailed to his fellow residents portraying SCA as a tranquil "good life" community, successive Boards beginning in 2007 managed to tarnish Sun City's image by engaging in acts of misconduct. Those acts coincided with the Association's election of its first all-member Board of Directors in 2007. To the dismay of homeowners, the transition from developer control to all-member boards foreshadowed recurring episodes of wrongdoing. Continuing up to the present time, successive Boards have been challenged to fully embrace good governance practices. The Association's transition from contractor to self-management in 2016 did not change this outlook, as least based on my own personal experience.
Our forthcoming e-book, Paradise Lost: The Sun City Anthem Story, tells the story of three of the most egregious episodes of Board misconduct occurring over the period from 2007 to 2016. Since those occurrences, successive Boards have engaged in some form of misconduct, if only to cover up evidence of past misconduct.
In order to understand why such episodes got started in 2007 and did not occur in the community's first eight years since 1999, earlier Boards had been composed of one or more Developer representatives. The last Developer appointed representative, Dea McDonald, sat on the 2006-07 Board. As long as at least one Developer representative sat on the Association's Board, that fact precluded any opportunity for boards to engage in misconduct, despite the facts that a majority of the Board's members consisted of unit owners beginning in 2005. The 2007 election produced the first all-member Board. And with that result, as reported to the community in our SCA View newsletters and in Paradise Lost: The Sun City Anthem Story, members of the 2007 Board implemented a plan to fabricate a key metric of the Villa reserves database. They did so to fabricate a false document, the "look-back" reserve study for the transition year ending 31 May 2005. That fabricated "look-back" reserve study was designed to relieve the Association of any liability from future claims by Villa owners for additional transition reserves and equitable relief that they were entitled to and had been guaranteed them by the terms of a legally binding Settlement Agreement entered into in 2007 between Pulte/Del Webb and the Association. Said differently, the 2007 Board literally "cooked the books" to effectively rob hundreds of thousands of dollars in reserves that was owed by the developer (and subsequently by the Association) to the owners of the Villas.
To see a list of Board directors from 1999 to 2020, click here.
Fourteen chapters of the e-book have been posted to a dedicated website and may be read by clicking on that site's home page here. Additional chapters will be posted in the coming months. Readers interested in learning how I came to write this e-book can read the e-book's "Acknowledgments" section by clicking here.