Author: Stonebridge "SAG" Administrator

Just rambling……

As some of you know, I studied the teachings of Milton Friedman and W. Edward Deming.  In today’s Star Ledge the attached articles capture two disasters created by our politicians.  The Friedman article is at a higher level than the second which is a costly inconvenience to the public.  These events all could have been predicted by these two men’s teachings.  The articles are interesting.

On another note, a report came out on the plastic bag fiasco.  Seems like plastic bags are turning up in landfills at a rate 3 to 4 times as many after the ban was enacted.  Wasn’t the ban supposed to reduce the number?  Well as best intentioned political moves, made without “profound knowledge ¹ ” , the system goes haywire.  Gov Murphy does what all good politicians do, and that is lie.  He believes “banning them was the right things to do.”  No, it wasn’t, but they cannot help themselves.  When caught, they spin the truth.  But outside the legal world, this is known as deceit and lying.  We went through this with the red-light camera fiasco years ago.  It took a 5 year “costly experiment” to figure out the assumptions were wrong for putting them in place 5 years earlier.

I could go on and on, but there is one simple truth.  The general public does not correlate how a decision years earlier by our elected officials adversely affects the population.  That delay on a timeline ensures that outcome.  What comes to mind is the saying, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  That cycle will continue over and over.  It would be better if the public demands that anyone running for office read the teaching of these two visionaries, Friedman and Deming.

¹ W. Edwards Deming defined those words to mean a system made up of four components: Appreciation for a system, Knowledge about variation, Theory of knowledge, and Knowledge of psychology. Profound knowledge is also used to describe someone who has deep insight or understanding.  – SB, my take, in short you have to know what you are doing.  Expecting an amateur to make a professional decision is an act of frustration.

Posted by Steven Birnbaum – As the ex-chair of the IT Committee, I can tell you we reviewed in early 2017 a system that would eliminate the issue of notification via email. Email is an unreliable communication for mass distribution for a host of reasons. Mass emails can be rejected by content, the senders hosting account, the residents hosting account and many other reasons. AOL is an example of a very aggressive firewall and content filtering system that many times will block normal email inadverrtantly. All email systems have elaborate mechanisms in an attemp to stop mass emails or spam. These mechanisms often block legitimate emails as well. In the early 2000’s the govenment instituded a Can-Spam law that set these parameters.

The system that was recommended will eliminate the many email problems that have been around for the last 10 years. Another benefit is it would replace the current website that is dated and too limited to be efficient and effective. Residents would have a Dashboard of every community notice and function always current and up to date.

The Dashboard would replace the home page of the current website. residents would be able to see the status of their workorders. Every ammenity that needs scheduling is controlled by a calendar and that calendar is shared, again on the residents Dashboard and can be programmed to be automatic.

This system is considered the top HOA management system in the business (unless a better one has come out in the last 2 years). The residents and the community deserve a modern communication system. This would also reduce the workload of the management company. Not taking into account of the cost savings of mamangement workload, the system would cost residents about 85 cents a month. I would suggest anyone that in interested in why it has not been implemented ask the management company.

One more note, sending one email per house was the case for sending out the resident directory before 2018. That was done because I maintained and sent out the resident directories. We used a system that limited the number of emails allowed to be sent per month. This was done because the previous board of directors refused to offer a resident directory for the residents and would not fund the required system. That function was turned over to the management company in late 2017.

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Politicians understand one thing and that is votes. Good leadership requires a vision of the future to avoid previous mistakes. Good leaders lay the groundwork for the future. When politicians fail the importance of Ad-Hoc, grass roots groups become evident.

We have seen a number of successes in Stonebridge by the dedicated work of Ad-Hoc groups. The original 350+ homes only had Comcast and did not have the choice for Fios. No committee in Stonebridge rectified that issue but an Ad-Hoc group did last year by bringing to the table a state senator, two assemblymen, the mayor and Verizon. After a 5 year initiative Fios was made available to those homes last year. An Ad-Hoc group convinced the Department of Community Affairs to require Lennar to infuse our reserve fund of $600k, no sanctioned committee did that.