To The Tahoe Donner Board of Directors:
In December, I stated that the ultimate result of the ski lodge replacement process must not be a beautiful new ski lodge and a broken community. As fiduciaries for the Tahoe Donner Association, the board’s essential duty is to make carefully considered, good-faith decisions benefiting the association as a whole. The advisory question outcome confirmed what many of us already knew from social media, our email inboxes, and board meetings: far from being whole, Tahoe Donner is divided by escalating conflict.
Repairing this divide will be a test of leadership and character. To deescalate this conflict and pave the way for repair, all five board members should use their personal influence to spread the following messages:
- When deployed against fellow community members, strategies of conflict and confrontation only ruin communities by creating and exacerbating division. Instead of bringing people of different perspectives together to work toward a mutually agreeable resolution, aggressive conflict escalation only drives people apart into ever more entrenched and adversarial positions.
- Intelligent, well-informed people acting in good faith and with good intentions sometimes see things differently. It is unjust and unneighborly to suggest or insinuate that a person who disagrees with you must have some unreasonable, irrational, or ignorant bias, desires an outcome you dread or detest, or has an undisclosed, sinister or corrupt ulterior motive.
- Attack, insult, and demonization are barren soils in which to cultivate strong, united communities. Doused with malicious and even slanderous personal attacks, our capacity for listening is the first thing that withers and dies, frustrating communication, and increasing anger and division. In time, attack, insult, and demonization wholly disintegrate the trust, mutual respect, and neighborly goodwill that are foundational for all strong and united communities.
The divides we are experiencing in our community should be a spur for serious self-reflection across the association. No matter whether the ski lodge issue is the cause of our divides or merely their crystallization, the resolution to the ski lodge issue must consciously and conscientiously be a first step toward making the association whole.
Toward this end, the board should consider the following guidance:
First, the board should resist the reductionist urge to treat the advisory question feedback as a referendum. Instead, the board should honor the full range of advice provided.
In November, when I wrote to the board recommending that it organize an advisory question, I spoke of honoring member opinion. Honoring member opinion means honoring the full range of member opinion.
Because referendums are inherently zero sum games, with the winner winning and the loser getting nothing, if the board treats the advisory question as a referendum, it will, in effect, throw away the input of approximately half the members. That would dishonor member opinion.
Charles Wu recently contacted me for advice about devising a ski lodge replacement resolution that is supported by a greater percentage of homeowners.
Having looked at the high level data and the deeper dive cross tabulations, it appears that there is wide support for replacing the ski lodge with a modern facility that serves our needs. However, it also appears that there is wide concern regarding the potential cost and scope of the current replacement proposal.
Might it be possible to find a resolution that is better supported by homeowners? In this regard, I would ask the board to recall what Charles Heath said about surveys being snapshots. His point was that public opinion is not static. It can change and it does change depending on countless factors. The advisory question provided the board with critical insights into some of the more salient factors. Those insights should help guide the board’s response.
The respondent numbers suggest that approximately 45% support the current ski lodge replacement project proposal. Can the proposal be modified to attract more supporters without alienating significant numbers of existing supporters? Possibly. Can additional information be provided to the community to sufficiently address concerns to convert a percentage of project skeptics into project proponents? Potentially. These options are not mutually exclusive.
Second, the board should expedite any changes that may be made to the replacement ski lodge proposal. For financial and other reasons, the board and the association have an interest in resolving the ski lodge issue as quickly as possible. In addition to potential financial costs, there could also be opportunity costs associated with project delays.
For the board, for staff, and for the members, the ski lodge replacement project often feels like an all-consuming fixation. The December 2021 member survey, which will be discussed at this Friday’s board meeting alongside the advisory question results, suggests a number of issues that require board and staff attention. The longer we delay the ski lodge project, the longer we potentially delay addressing those other needs. Delaying effective action on these other issues will likely exacerbate community divisions.
Third, having deliberately sought the members’ advice on the current ski lodge replacement proposal, the board is obliged to be responsive to that advice.
The board should not over-simplify what it means to be responsive to member advice. It may be possible to be responsive by working with the architects and staff to modify the existing proposal to increase efficiency and reduce costs while still satisfying our priority needs and expectations. (I would remind the board that it earlier challenged the architects to shave one million dollars off the project cost.)
It may also be that, given the fixed costs associated with the project, or given the costs associated with a delay, no meaningful cost savings can be implemented. In that case, being responsive could require the board to explain in greater clarity why the existing design is ultimately the most cost effective design for our purposes.
As I stated previously, “If we wish to accomplish anything positive and productive for our community, we must return to a calm, humane, and reasonable approach to governance.” I pushed to conduct the advisory question because I believed it could help set us on a path toward that return. I still believe that is possible, provided we are all guided, in Lincoln’s words, “by the better angels of our nature.”
Thank you,
Benjamin R. Levine
Hillside Drive