Vic Socotra

24 July 2008

Big Pink Plywood

We were at the Unitarian-Universalist church across the big ditch of Route 50. When I walked in the average age of the crowd dropped at least a year, and I am no spring chicken. I knew they were gong to be spring-loaded with concern, and was prepared to listen to a certain amount of the Black Helicopters ranting about the evil cabal that was attempting to keep the truth from them.

There was no vote impending, so what I wanted from the meeting was what management was thinking.

The Board really isn’t the management, although they are the mechanism by which the owners have a democratic say in the way life is lived at Big Pink. Peggy is the stout cheerful woman who has the account for the Management company that collects our condo fees and in exchange pays the taxes, arranges trash collection, landscaping and manages large capital projects. Her company handles several of the large concrete islands here in Arlington County, and they achieve savings through economies of scale that the individual buildings could never manage on their own.

Or so they say.

I do not attribute anything around here to conspiracy, though I do suspect there is a cozy relationship between some of the favored contractors, not that I am inferring anything inappropriate. Peggy does have quite a fixation with the quarter million dollars it is going to cost to grind up the parking lot and replace it. She says it is too far gone to be patched again, and like Interstate Highway system in rust belt Michigan, is just going to have to be ground down to the earth and replaced.

It is one of those pay-me-now, pay-me-later deals. Not that anyone wants to hear it. There are a lot of projects we could have taken care of in the go-go years of low interest rates and high demand for Big Pink units. The time has past for all that, and representatives of the various pipers where there in the hall to be paid, or at least to present informational sound-bites on what is going to have to happen.

I walked in a few minutes late and sat to the side at a folding table near the window so I had a surface on which to take notes. The President kicked things off by saying that we had several problems, and the town meeting was intended to address them, and present the likely outcomes.

On the table was a stapled sheaf of paper that had a Microsoft ExCel spread sheet of all the units. I found mine, and noted that my ownership of Big Pink amounts to .7173 percent of the total holdings. That is the number on which the Special Assessment will be based, apparently, and enables you to do your own mat h on the fly when they are talking about millions of dollars.

Less than one percent. Couldn’t be that bad, you would think, until you start to do the math. Jim the Treasurer had the hot seat for that one, and he plowed through his report with his neck slightly hunched, to avoid exposing additional flesh.

It was simple, really. We panicked last year at the prospect of the riser-pipes failing and flooding the building. We expended a good chunk of the reserve in order to accelerate the replacement of the pipes with good honest copper, which costs slightly less than gold these days.

The Reserve needs to be refreshed. It is only prudent. He had three columns of options, payable over three years, one kicking in $800,000, a second at an even $1,000,000, and a third at a somewhat ominous $1,300,000.

My options came to .7173; which is to say, $5,739, $7,173, and $9,325. Divide by 36, and the number almost looks manageable. Of course, I am still working, and it looks like I will be for a while.

Most of those in the audience are not, which may account for their interest and presence. Jim concluded by saying that this, of course, did not include a prospect 5% increase to the basic condo fees annually to accommoda te the rise in commodities like fuel oil, and that was why the Windows team representing the manufacturing, installation and engineering firm that would install the new glass to replace the single-pane windows that are original equipment.

Treasurer Jim indicated that his figures did not include the cost for the window replacement, since that would not be known until the job was put out for competitive bid, which would cost $17,000 on its own, nor the looming project on the tired Otis elevators. Then he sat down, his piece of delivering the bad news done.

The vendors all had informational pitches about the window issue. One of them was named Damon, and he had a well-cut suit and a mane of neatly brushed blonde hair. He was well spoken, and outlined the upside to window replacement: better re -sale value, more efficient sound attenuation, and, of course, efficiency. He described the original equipment steel-framed windows, caulked with asbestos and painted with lead, as the cheapest that had been on the market in the 1960s. Their insulation value was exactly the same as a windshield, which is to say that they serve to keep the breeze and water outside and let the light in.

As for anything else, plywood would be more efficient.

He was personably and breezy in the presentation, thinking perhaps that logic had something to do with the meeting. He made the mistake of opening the floor to questions, thinking that someone might want to comment on the cost-saving aspects of the double-pane casement design that completely encloses the hazardous material without having to touch it, producing dramati c savings. No men in space-suits are required to disturb it.

The questions were a big mistake. Tom from the eighth floor had raised his hand and been duly recognized. He rose with a notebook and began a thorough indictment of the Management firm, the Board, whose malign agenda was now fully exposed, the engineering company, the superior condition of some parts of the asphalt, which he had documented in a series of 8 x 10 glossy photos, and the Trilateral Commission, which was apparently responsible for the material deterioration of the building.

He concluded his remarks by noting that a homeopathic process using common house-hold vinegar could provide all the protection from asbestos that anyone would need. He stopped short of recommending that the building make a series of visits to Mexico, where20innovative construction processes were readily available, to return us to good health and efficiency.

The engineer on the panel looked pained.

In his haste to get past the speech, the Vendor made another mistake, pointing at Edna from the seventh floor before the President was able to elbow his away from the microphone. Edna was the woman whose tears at the last annual meeting had convinced us to deplete the reserve to fix the pipes. She had been crouched atop her furniture awaiting the flood, apprehensive, and apparently had a lot of time to think. Her cable internet connection worked up there, and she had done her homework.

She said no consideration had been made to the alternatives, and she was loaded for bear, and had props. She displayed a roll of double-sided tape with weather stripping. She announced that this miracle had been procured at the Home Depot for only pennies on the dollar, and its existence had been concealed in order to promote an expensive and unnecessary expense.

The President was losing control of the situation. This clearly had been intended to allow the owners to blow off some steam, but the venting was getting over his head.
I gathered my notes together. I did not have anything constructive to say, except maybe the truth, which was irrelevant to the people on fixed incomes.

Big Pink is old enough that the individual units do not have utility meters. Everyone is billed collectively for energy use. This problem, and the replacement windows issue, would be a done deal if we each had to pay every month out of our own pockets for our purely individual choices on how hot and how cold we wanted our places kept.

Rain began to pummel the window behind me, and the sky flashed with lightning. I had my numbers, and I knew what I had to plan for, high and low end. I also had an answer, even if no one wanted to hear it, since installing meters would also cost money.

There was a voice of reason from the middle of the audience. A fit older man arose, said he was a retired hospital administrator who in his professional life had to cope with a disintegrating building with windows just like Big Pink. He had tried all the alternatives under a constrained budget, and ultimately, he had done just what the vendors were recommending. The audience greeted his remarks with icy silence. I pulled my notes together and got ready to leave.

As I left, discretely as possible, an Asian woman in the back row was railing against the national energy policy. It seemed a reasonable enough approach, though what the condo Board was supposed to do about it was a little unclear.

When I got back to the unit above the pool, I found to my relief that the windows had worked well enough to keep out the rain. It was much better than plywood.

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