Reston Spring
Reston Spring
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Reston Recall files Official Conflict of Interest Complaint against RA Board's Eve Thompson
As shown in the document below, Ed Abbott, Reston Recall, has filed an official conflict of interest complaint against Eve Thompson for failing to fully disclose her personal interests in businesses in and around Lake Anne Village Center. The complaint notes the specific failures and her continued participation in matters pertaining to LAVC, including the undisclosed relationship between herself and her husband who presented a request for RA financing of dock improvements at Lake Anne. If the RA Board does not address Reston Recall's request in a satisfactory matter, Reston Recall has the right to appeal to the Virginia HOA ombudsman.
Friday, February 10, 2017
RA's Tetra "Independent Review" Contract and Key Offers
Below we offer Restonians the full text of the "independent review" contract RA signed with StoneTurn Group and the first and final draft contract offers it made to Mediaworld. Separately we have commented on some key substantive differences between the final Mediaworld draft and the agreement RA signed with StoneTurn Group highlighting how prejudicial the Mediaworld offer was. If you compare the two Mediaworld contract offers, you will also find that the first offer was even more prejudicial than the final offer.
Also, although there are few differences in the scope of the proposed contract between the several offerings, StoneTurn Group answers to questions at the community meeting yesterday suggested that Restonians would not be satisfied with the result of the StoneTurn Group effort.
Although we have been having some difficulty with the comments section, we welcome your thoughts in the comments section below on these contract alternatives. If you are having problems posting your comment, please send them as an e-mail to terrmayn@yahoo.com and we will post them.
Also, although there are few differences in the scope of the proposed contract between the several offerings, StoneTurn Group answers to questions at the community meeting yesterday suggested that Restonians would not be satisfied with the result of the StoneTurn Group effort.
Although we have been having some difficulty with the comments section, we welcome your thoughts in the comments section below on these contract alternatives. If you are having problems posting your comment, please send them as an e-mail to terrmayn@yahoo.com and we will post them.
Final Revised RA Offer to Mediaworld for Tetra Review Contract Including Updated Schedule B--DeC-14-16 by TerryMaynard on Scribd
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):
2. Misinformation on Tetra property purchase from Rick Beyer, former RA Board member, April 12, 2015.
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Prospects for a thorough Tetra independent review don't look good after this afternoon's community meeting.
UPDATED: We have included the video of the two-hour meeting at the end of this post.
This afternoon (and continuing through this evening), RA and its Tetra Review Committee held a community forum to provide StoneTurn Group (STG) community inputs about the continuing Tetra financial fiasco as a part of its just-initiated independent review. STG was represented by Deidre Flaherty, a founding partner at STG. Also at the table were Mike Sanio, VP, RA Board, and Eric Carr, Chairman of the Tetra Review Committee (but not a member of the Board).
The meeting was lively, sometimes intense, and probably much different than STG was expecting. The community members all agreed that they loved Reston and usually respected RA, but argued that the Tetra affair was terrible. At the most general level, the 40 or so Restonians there clearly displayed the high level of distrust the community holds for the RA Board and its handling of the Tetra acquisition and renovation. While VP Sanio repeatedly noted that the Board also wanted to understand what went wrong and correct processes to prevent the mistakes from happening in the future, community members highlighted that the Board and RA staff caused all the specific problems, that it was forced to take on the independent review by the community, and that the Board controlled the "independent review" process, including offering only a prejudicial contract to Mediaworld which would have done the work for one dollar.
Almost every Restonian who spoke challenged RA's handling of the Tetra affair and, more specifically, was skeptical that STG could pull of the kind of independent review the community (vice the Board) expected within the 19 days (February 28, 2017) and $45,000 budget allowed to investigate, analyze, draft, review, and publish a meaningful investigative product on the topic. Flaherty was repeatedly challenged on how STG intended to provide a comprehensive report and, in particular, expressed concern that RA would extend the contract and add to its contract cost under this time and materials contract.
Answers by Flaherty to several questions from resident Ed Abbott, chairman of the Reston Recall Committee, concerning the scope of STG's work were not reassuring. Specifically
From the two hours of discussion we attended, it appears that RA members can expect little more than some process and procedure improvement proposals from STG as called for in its third task. Many suggested that this would be just additional waste of money on a project that has already cost Restonians millions of dollars.
In case the embedded version disappears again, here is the link to the video on youtube.com: https://youtu.be/NJaot1Sv7Qw
This afternoon (and continuing through this evening), RA and its Tetra Review Committee held a community forum to provide StoneTurn Group (STG) community inputs about the continuing Tetra financial fiasco as a part of its just-initiated independent review. STG was represented by Deidre Flaherty, a founding partner at STG. Also at the table were Mike Sanio, VP, RA Board, and Eric Carr, Chairman of the Tetra Review Committee (but not a member of the Board).
The meeting was lively, sometimes intense, and probably much different than STG was expecting. The community members all agreed that they loved Reston and usually respected RA, but argued that the Tetra affair was terrible. At the most general level, the 40 or so Restonians there clearly displayed the high level of distrust the community holds for the RA Board and its handling of the Tetra acquisition and renovation. While VP Sanio repeatedly noted that the Board also wanted to understand what went wrong and correct processes to prevent the mistakes from happening in the future, community members highlighted that the Board and RA staff caused all the specific problems, that it was forced to take on the independent review by the community, and that the Board controlled the "independent review" process, including offering only a prejudicial contract to Mediaworld which would have done the work for one dollar.
Almost every Restonian who spoke challenged RA's handling of the Tetra affair and, more specifically, was skeptical that STG could pull of the kind of independent review the community (vice the Board) expected within the 19 days (February 28, 2017) and $45,000 budget allowed to investigate, analyze, draft, review, and publish a meaningful investigative product on the topic. Flaherty was repeatedly challenged on how STG intended to provide a comprehensive report and, in particular, expressed concern that RA would extend the contract and add to its contract cost under this time and materials contract.
Answers by Flaherty to several questions from resident Ed Abbott, chairman of the Reston Recall Committee, concerning the scope of STG's work were not reassuring. Specifically
- Flaherty stated it was not STG's intention to identify people who were responsible for the financial and management disaster so they could be held accountable.
- In response to another question, Flaherty did not know if STG would make public the details of RA Board discussions held in Executive Session. Sanio noted that STG would have access to anyone they wanted, but Richard Chew--a former RA Board member--pointed that Board members may not disclose the substance of Executive Sessions, even after they have left the Board.
- Flaherty also said that STG would not be looking for conflicts of interest (COI), but would report them to her two points of contact (Sanio and Carr) if they were discovered in the course of their work.
- Similarly, Flaherty stated that STG would not pursue violations of Virginia law, including the Property Owners Association Act, but would inform Sanio and Carr if they discovered any. Carr noted that he would report any allegations of illegal activity reported to him.
1) reviewing the accuracy of budgets and other information provided in the referendum for the Tetra/Lake House Project by the Association to its members and the Board, as well as the process utilized to prepare those documents;
3) making such recommendations for revising, modifying and/or supplementing the processes, internal controls and governance procedures of the Association to ensure future large-scale projects are (a) accurately budgeted and (b) conducted in accordance with best generally accepted principles and practices for similarly situated not-for-profit organizations.Restonians present at the meeting were not very encouraged by these contract requirements, several speakers noting Restonians need to know the who, what, how, and why of the many bad decisions made in the Tetra purchase and renovation process.
From the two hours of discussion we attended, it appears that RA members can expect little more than some process and procedure improvement proposals from STG as called for in its third task. Many suggested that this would be just additional waste of money on a project that has already cost Restonians millions of dollars.
In case the embedded version disappears again, here is the link to the video on youtube.com: https://youtu.be/NJaot1Sv7Qw
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