Reston Spring

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Reston Spring

Friday, February 10, 2017

Reston 20/20 Statement to StoneTurn Group at the Tetra Review Community Meeting, Februrary 9, 2017



Statement of
Terry Maynard, Co-Chair, Reston 20/20 Committee
To the StoneTurn Group
Re the Independent Review of the Tetra Property Acquisition and Renovation
February 9, 2017

Good afternoon.  My name is Terry Maynard, 2217 Wakerobin Lane, and I have been a resident of Reston for more than three decades.   I am co-chair of the Reston 20/20 Committee, an informal committee of Restonians interested in sustaining Robert Simon’s vision for our beautiful planned community.   In other community roles, I have served as a member of the Reston Citizens Association Board of Directors and its representative on the Reston Master Plan Task Force.  

As Reston 20/20’s co-chair, I am here this afternoon to encourage you to pursue a vigorous investigation and comprehensive report on what we believe is the greatest leadership crisis in the history of the Reston Association.   Never have so many people in Reston’s leadership on the RA Board of Directors and among its senior staff behaved so unethically if not outright illegally, demonstrated such complete incompetence in analyzing and managing the finances of a single RA project, and used secrecy behind a legal façade to protect the guilty while so neglecting the interests of the community. 

The challenge ahead of you to try to uncover, digest, analyze, and present to the Reston community, not just the Board, a report in just one month detailing all the errors and misdeeds that have been reported, much less a course of corrective action, is daunting.  Still, the community needs you to detail the who, how, when, and why of all these events or we will continue to be ill-served.  A simple set of process improvement recommendations will be inadequate and a further waste of RA members’ money on the Tetra fiasco.  Moreover, your process recommendations will quite likely be ignored by the Board of Directors and RA staff in the end.

Reston 20/20 has been at the forefront of the effort to prevent and expose the ongoing fiasco dating back to at least April 2015.  Our blog has more than 40 posts about the evolving Tetra morass ranging from analyses during the referendum period of the financial hole it has now put the community in to RA’s prejudicial negotiations with Mediaworld for the independent review contract you now have.   Most of it is original; some of it we re-posted from other sources, including our op-eds that have appeared in RestonNow and the Reston Connection.  And we have testified before the RA Board and at its community meetings during the referendum period. 

I look forward to discussing any and all of our work with you at your convenience.  You will find in reading our products and in our discussions that we try to document our methods as well as our results, including any assumptions that we may have made, wherever we can.  Nonetheless, our analyses are based on publicly available information—including information we have requested and received from RA—and, as a result, are necessarily more limited than we would like.   

To get you started in looking at what we have done, I am giving you a selection of posts from the Reston 20/20 that shows a bit of the range of work we have done on the issues surrounding Tetra.  I hope you come to understand, challenge, and report on these issues and others.  Maybe most importantly, it includes a paper identifying the eight key issues that we believe ought to be addressed in your effort.  This issue paper was included in the RFP you received.  We think it should be the foundation document for your investigation and report. 

You have a challenging task ahead that is of vital importance to the good governance of our community.  I wish you the best in your efforts and offer to sit down to discuss the Tetra matter with you at your convenience. 

Thank you for your time and good luck. 


Attachments (in chronological order):

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