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Joe Sikes
Written by Greg Hankins, Editor   
Thursday, 04 February 2010
Joe Sikes is a retired Foreign Service Officer with the US State Department, who served in Ivory Coast, Rwanda, England, Senegal, and Sudan.
Image    In introducing himself to the community as a Board candidate during the January 26 SLWLA Board Meeting, Sikes spent a good bit of time, in a humorous and self-deprecating vein, persuading landowners to not vote for him.
    When The Times asked Sikes why, in fact, voters might want to cast their ballot for him rather than one of the other candidates, he said:
    “What I said at that meeting was not entirely meant to elicit giggles. I am quite ambivalent about this.”
    “I do not have an agenda. I am not looking for a job. But I think that people do need to be prepared to participate in the running of a self-governing community.”
    “I don’t know that I bring anything to the table that the other three candidates don’t bring,” Sikes added.
    “And I don’t suppose I am any less qualified either. If think, if I were elected, I could do a reasonable job.”
    “I don’t think, unless you have actually participated in the [Board’s] process, that you can really understand what it’s all about. If it’s anything like any of the other organizations I have dealt with, the interplay of the personalities on that Board has to be key to what actually happens, what actually transpires, what actually comes out of the other end of the pipe. And, unless you have been there, you can’t actually know what that is
    “I think what’s important is the process.” Noting that he was deeply impressed by the civility of public comment on the budget during a recent Board Meeting, Sikes said “I think that in part goes back to a pretty good job done by the current board to be prepared for the meeting and also to prepare the electorate for the meeting.”
    
Key Issues
    Asked about the key issues facing Seven Lakes West, Sikes told The Times: “I think that most of the priorities are pretty much agreed upon, in broad terms. What you do in any specific sense is where you will have disagreements. As long as you can keep the membership informed, then it’s very hard to take umbrage at a rational decision . . . This Board has done a pretty damn good job of that.”
    Sikes noted that many of the key issues are “quite technical.”
    “For example, the issue of road maintenance is quite technical. The data may be there, but there are not that many people who are going to plow through it. And even if they do plow through it they may not understand the implications of it.”
    The reopening of the road across the dam is another highly technical issue, Sikes said. “I personally am in favor of opening that dam. But that’s said in a vacuum. That’s just an opinion. When the state says yea or nay on the dam, that will come into greater focus, and there will have to be a great deal of activity trying educate people about highly technical issues that most people might not want to be educated about.”
    The need for reserves is another area where communication is essential, but difficult, Sikes told The Times. “I think it’s a challenge to explain to people why you want to have reserve funds or sinking funds for anticipated problems. It’s a hard sell, I think, to suggest to people that having nice roads increases their property values.”
    “The reality is not so much that nice roads are going to increase your property values — though they will — but that really poor roads will demolish your property values.”
    “This is an area that the board is going to have to keep working on,” Sikes said, “because other things will come up and burn those reserves the board is putting together. I think that is an ongoing issue.”
    Security is another ongoing issue, Sikes told The Times. He noted that the issue often tends to be framed in terms of crime, but that safety is equally, if not more important. Noting the dangerous mix of pedestrains and often fast-moving vehicles on Longleaf, Sikes noted, “People tend to await until something catastrophic happens before there’s any reason to deal with it. You don’t want somebody run over before someone says ‘Gee, we ought to think about that.’”
    Improving communication from the Board to the membership and vice versa is “A process that has been on-going and needs to be kept going.” Sikes said the Board needs to continue to enhance that process as it discovers specific groups that may not be reached by current communications.
    “The new Board needs to be finding those gaps and trying to fill them,” he told The Times. “I’m not persuaded that there is sufficient understanding amongst the generations in Seven Lakes West. Everyone gives lip service to the fact that there are younger people coming in . . . but I am not convinced that there has been sufficient effort to actually probe into that and say, ‘What does that really mean?’ How does that affect the governance of the Association and the application of the resources of the Association?’ I think that’s an important thing to look at.
    
Budget & Dues
    “I’ve been non-committal about that,” Sikes said when asked whether he supported the proposed budget and dues increase. “I think that the dues here are not excessive. And while I think that a 36 percent increase is a shock . . . the amount of money that we are talking about is not out of line, in my judgement, with the amenities provided to the residents.
    “Would I have liked that to have gotten there are different way. Yes. Do I believe that you could arrive there a different way? That’s one where I am not sure I have enough information. I think the Board did a very good job in presenting its rationale, and I find that rationale to be powerful.’
    “Am I in favor of the budget? Emotionally, you say, ‘Well hell no, I don’t want to pay any more.’ But rationally, I saw nothing in that budget that on the face of it, you could throw off the sled.”
    “The key issue is, ‘What do you think about reserves?’ And that’s where I say that I don’t know that I know enough about it to take a hard and fast stand. It sounds rational to build reserves.”
    That doesn’t make absorbing the dues increase any easier for some families, Sikes acknowledged: “There are people who have lost a great deal of what they expected to have for their retirement in this market downturn and we have to be sensitive to that . . .Notwithstanding that the dues increase is something you might spend going out and having McDonald’s hamburgers, some people aren’t going out and having McDonald’s hamburgers and they are not having a glass of wine, and they are wondering how they are going to get through. They are watching the stock market with considerable anxiety and you have to be sensitive to that.”
    
Finding nominees
    Asked why it is so difficult to find folks to serve on the Board, Sikes said the time commitment is often cited, but the real problem may be the abuse Board members often suffer when making hard decisions.
    “People do not want to be abused,” Sikes told The Times, “they don’t want to be perceived as bad guys. Many of them have not had experience doing things that are not popular. They don’t want that stress.”
    
No job preference
    Sikes said he had no particular preference for chairing one committee or doing one job on the Board over another. “I’ll be the new kid on the block — so I guess that means I’ll get to do whatever no one else wants to do!”
    “The only one I would resist with energy would be the Community Activities committee. I cannot imagine I would be any good at that. I’m very private.”
    He noted that some of the positions on the Board are quite technical and would likely benefit from the leadership of a Board member with particular experience or history in that area. Preserving “institutional memory in those areas is critical, Sikes said, adding that that memory can be preserved, in part, from Board to Board by “by devolving some of that on standing subcommittees — Like the British government, where you have permanent undersecretaries. They are the institutional memory. Something like that can be very useful in this kind of governance.”
    “That way you’re not reinventing the wheel every year,” Sikes said. “If you do it well, it will reduce the amount of time each board member must spend, for example, running meetings. If you can couple that with an increasing confidence in the management company, then you go a long way toward making the board a policy-making forum and not and executive forum.”
    Noting that Board members are inevitably involved in hands-on execution of policy, Sikes said that, nevertheless, “I suspect that in order to be most effective you have to believe you are a policy-maker, not a mechanic. I am not going out and patching the roads myself. My job is to persuade the community that they do want the roads fixed.”
 
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