Secretary Report for Surf Pines from our annual meeting Saturday 7 August 2021

This was presented at the Zoom Annual Meeting.

Good morning, most may not realize it, but the last two years have been an exciting reinvention of Surf Pines Association. Over the last 10+ years much of our internal infrastructure has badly degraded. For example, we had eight or nine separate data bases tracking our membership with little to no correlation. Our web site had no management since Jeff Hall stepped down in the late 2000’s. The Breeze had diminished to just a few pages managed by the President. Communications was derided by many members as almost non-existent. Our e-mail list had dropped to less than 200 members, which included several members of the same household.

In the last 2 years we combined most of the data bases into one verified Sales Force based database. We also upgraded our web site to a web engine with the leading municipal government system providers to support us. We integrated our web with a robust Blog and interactive Face Book and Next-Door social sites. Our E-mail blast system, MailChimp, now has over 482-member e-mails. We’ve averaged over 65% opens and over 18% unique open rates on items with links. We also have converted most of our direct mail pieces to digital distribution, like the Astoria Golf and Country Club, saving your Association several thousand dollars a year. In addition, we have converted over 12,000 SP paper documents into a digital vault in a searchable PDF format to assist in referencing history to address issues today. 

This has been done at little to no cost to SPA, since most of this updating was done with volunteers from your Association. To achieve this reinvention of SP infrastructure some members of your Board have put in 10 to 20 hours a week trying to bring our internal systems back up to date. 

However, this is not tenable for the future. since we now have 407 Buildable properties with 353 homes. Yet we only have one part time person managing bookkeeping, administration, and business management. Compare this to other HOA’s like Clairmont village on the west plains of Portland, with only 20% more properties, has three full time employees. Granted their dues are more than our very low $535 a year. However, we leave our selves in a precarious position since much of the association operations are managed by volunteer members who have little experience in dealing with the complicated rules governing planned developments. 

So, our/my goal next year is to review professional alternatives to ensure that all the work done over the last 2 years continues forward. Otherwise as current BOD members are replaced, we may find Surf Pines in the same situation as we found ourselves two years ago.

In closing, I want to thank Scott Roose, Debbie Eddie, Evan Reed, Roberta Becker, Ken Weist, Bonnie Rogie, Katie Weber, Chad Sweet, Clare Lewis and many others for their assistance in contributing their time and assistance updating our data and social presence. We do need volunteers. If you are interested in doing more for your community, please join one of our committees. If you are interested in the history of the area let me know. This is what makes Surf Pines great, it’s you the members…