Turmoil strikes retirement community

David Kihara

Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2005 | 8:36 a.m.

The heated campaigning to join a board that oversees an approximately $14 million budget led to one candidate dropping out after being labeled a neo-Nazi.

It's not some city council race. It's the Sun City Summerlin homeowners association election.

Tonight the owners of 7,776 homes in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in town are to choose four people to join their homeowners association's nine-member board of directors.

In many ways Sun City Summerlin's homeowners association is like the many others throughout the valley. The board members are responsible for managing the operations of the community, maintaining its various community centers and other amenities and handling its annual budget.

Several things make the competition for the Sun City Summerlin board different, however. To start with, there's the constituency.

Built around three golf courses, many of the homes in the master-planned community these days can sell for $800,000 to millions of dollars. More than 14,000 people live there, and it's an age-restricted community -- only people older than 55 are allowed to live there. Some are on fixed incomes and bought into the neighborhood as a place to retire only to see there annual fees grow to the point of being unaffordable.

Large annual budget

Those fees feed a relatively large annual budget that the board oversees, just a few million dollars less than Boulder City.

Then there's the scope, value and cost of the amenities the board oversees. In addition to the three golf courses, there are four community center complexes covering about 440,000-square-feet each.

The Desert Vista Community Center, for example, has a grand ballroom, an olympic sized indoor swimming pool and an outdoor pool, a billiards room, arts and crafts centers, a gym-sized fitness center and tennis courts. The three other community centers are nearly identical.

The current election also was made more contentious by a decade-old letter that was written by one of the candidates.

Until last month, Jason Brent, a retired lawyer who moved to the valley from California about eight years ago, had been running for one of the four open seats on the board. According to a letter he e-mailed to residents of the community on Dec. 17, he dropped out of the race because he wanted to end the "smearing of my respected name and reputation."

Several Sun City Summerlin residents had investigated the backgrounds of the various candidates for the board and had turned up a letter that Brent had written in January 1995.

Brent's commentary, which appeared in the monthly newsletter for the California chapter of Mensa, held what many considered white supremacy, pro-Nazi viewpoints. He advocated the creation of a master race, and advised that some people, such as the homeless or the elderly, should be "humanely dispatched."

Letter made the news

The letter caused a minor dust-up. The Los Angeles Times wrote about Brent, as did several other major newspapers and the Associated Press. Brent never apologized for the story, nor did he recant in any way. Then as quickly as he had popped into the public spotlight, Brent disappeared from it -- until he decided to run for the Sun City Summerlin HOA board a decade later.

When some of his fellow residents found that L.A. Times article, they spread the word about Brent's letter through an Internet chatroom and challenged Brent about what he had written.

A few days prior to dropping out of the board race, Brent posted an open letter on the chatroom site apologizing "if the harsh words and examples I used in my letter" offended anyone.

He noted that in the letter he had twice stated that he was specifically using "words to irritate and annoy the reader. Those words were intended to provoke a very heated discussion about the future of humanity. The basic premise is that the earth is finite and neither population nor economic growth can continue infinitely into the future."

Whoever wins election to the board will be dealing with the question of whether economic growth can continue infinitely into the future in Sun City Summerlin, where it's a topic that is as much a lightning rod as Brent's decade-old letter.

Brent graduated from Columbia University's law school in New York and served as a municipal court judge in East Kern County, Calif., prior to moving to Nevada.

Reasons for running

The people left in the race for the unpaid two-year terms on the board all appear to have had successful careers.

Asked why he would want the headaches that come with the positions, candidate Ken Caroccia, 57, who was a store director for Ralphs Grocery Company for 35 years, said, "I found that when I ran in California (for a position on a homeowners association), we did a lot of good things there for the community. I get a high when I can help people and see them enjoying themselves."

The other candidates include David Steinman, who worked in real estate for 40 years and was appointed last year as commissioner of the Las Vegas Planning Committee. Also running are: Richard Post, former vice president of United Airlines in Hawaii; Ed Barkin, a prior board member whose campaign material emphasizes his managerial background; Allan Baer, a retired businessman; and Orin "Bud" Cook, who campaigned on a platform of cost control to avoid fee increases.

Fee increases, particularly as tied to the three golf courses at Sun City Summerlin, are by far the most divisive issue among the community's residents.

The acrimony stems from the fact that very few residents in Sun City actually use the golf courses, according to many residents. Despite this, they are forced to pay rising homeowners dues and special assessment taxes to maintain the upkeep of the courses.

At a "meet the candidates" meeting at one of the Sun City Summerlin's community centers in the beginning of January, Paul Callaghan, a retired nuclear engineer seeking a seat on the board, mentioned that he did not regularly play golf, but when he did, he would go to another course outside of the community.

"Traitor!" shouted a woman from the back of the room.

In addition to being a source of pride, the golf courses act as flood control channels that help guide stormwater into the proper detention areas, said Tom Brennan, a current board member and a former general manager for American Airlines in Nevada.

He conceded that very few residents of the community play golf at the courses.

"The number of people who regularly use it is about 10 percent," he said. "We are not making a profit on the golf course."

The golf courses enhance the lifestyle of the residents and increase property values, and therefore the golf courses are an overall benefit to the residents, the courses' advocates say.

$700 assessment

Last year, however, the residents were hit with a one-time assessment fee of $700 because the Sun City Summerlin's budgetary reserves had hit an all-time low. Most residents pay about $975 annually in homeowners dues, and the additional $700 was not welcomed -- especially because a chunk of the $5.5 million collected by the residents went to the upkeep of one of the golf courses.

According to Brennan, the board of directors decided that $1.3 million of the reserves would go to replacing the grass at the Highland Falls golf course and to replenish the facilities and sandtraps. This was met with frustration from some residents.

Baer's campaign flier notes: "The special assessments, although painful, did correct the financial problems that the association was facing in early 2004. The executive director hired a business operations manager to oversee both golf and restaurants. A salesman was hired to promote golf and attract outside tournaments. Golf is starting to look as it did in the first half (of) 2001."

But, he notes on his flier, while xeriscaping projects have cut water usage on the golf courses, "we need to revisit areas on the golf courses that do need additional ground cover."

Callaghan's flier, meanwhile, notes that he will work to "evaluate all options to insure golf losses are reversed.'

Don't need courses

Eighty-year-old Flo Grady, a Sun City resident since 1990, has a different idea of what should be done, however, and one that some other residents share.

It's real simple, she said: "We don't need three golf courses."

She was one of the first residents in Sun City Summerlin. She said she moved to the area in 1990 from Corvine, Calif., because she and her husband believed it to be a nice place to retire and live out their remaining years. She said she bought her 1,400-square-foot home for $113,000 in 1990 and paid $250 a year in homeowners dues.

Since then, however, the entire Sun City Summerlin community has changed drastically. The housing prices have skyrocketed, and the Gradys' dues have increased by $729 -- as have those of her neighbors who have lived there for about the same amount of time.

"For us, a $900 fee puts a real hole in our bank account," said Grady, who lives on a fixed income provided by her and her husband's Social Security checks.

Former board candidate Brent says people who expected to live in Sun City Summerlin but not have their homeowners dues increase have "been living in a fool's paradise."

That view is shared by others in the community who say: If you don't like it, you should move.

Grady and others counter that they never expected the community to grow at such a rapid rate.

"We're old and we want to stay right here," she said. "Don't get me wrong -- you get a lot of amenities here. But some of us are not able to pay for it."

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