In a 6-3 split vote at the March 16, 2024, meeting of the SROA Board of Directors, they approved the Design Committee’s extreme prohibition against Sunriver owners protecting native plants on their own lots. (Click here to view the new rules.)

To get a true sense of how the six directors completely dismissed the owners they’re supposed to represent, watch the 30-minute excerpt of the webcast from the March 15, 2024, SROA Board Work Session at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QXmMlCK1AGueq3TWch6YVbZAXbydyV60/view

This cavalier treatment of a serious impact on owners comprised an astoundingly dysfunctional series of false, misleading, and irrelevant statements, excuses and belittlement of owners who made the effort to submit their opinions to the Board. Here are a few examples:

At timeline 1:00 — Keith Kessaris (Asst. General Manager) & James Lewis (General Manager) misrepresented and belittled comments from over 100 owners who expressed opposition to the extreme and flawed Design Committee proposal. Keep in mind that despite all the promotional efforts by the SROA, only 10 owners expressed support for the proposal — two of whom were Design Committee members, and one a Board member.

2:58 Lewis: “There were four different sets of postcards that were mailed out to a select group of owners.”

FALSE! There were three (not four) sets of postcards, and 4/5 of them were sent to a randomized selection, not “a select group of owners” with existing plant protections.

4:22 Director Mark Murray: “I’d like to speak on behalf of that apparent minority of owners that believes there should be no protections, period. And so, I will represent those. … Let nature take its course for good or evil. … We’ve all heard horror stories of HOAs that go overboard, and we don’t want to be that HOA either.”

COMMENT: Perhaps the most glaringly wrong view of a Board member’s responsibility. Murray is not supposed to “represent” a tiny fraction of owners with whom he happens to agree.

6:13 Kessaris: “The Design Committee at their March 8th meeting, they talked about the comments by owners that were received during the 60-day period, and the decision, recommendation back to the board at today’s meeting is that they’re not going to change what they proposed to you in [sic] December 15th.”

FALSE! The Design Committee absolutely did not discuss a single comment from any owner. Without discussion, they quickly voted not to make a single change.

6:38 Kessaris: “Prior to June 14th of this year when the original Design Manual was in place for over 35 years, if you wanted to protect your trees or plants, or shrubs at that time, you had to go through the Design Committee approval process. It was not carte blanche, yes you can just go do it. So, you had to follow [sic] a landscape plan, you had to submit a landscape plan, [muddled] the site plan; and then the Design Committee took a look at your project and made a decision whether that could be placed on your property or not. So once the June 15th new Design Manual came out, … the task force after 22 meetings decided that they wanted to remove that portion of the rule and not allow any protection at all.”

INCONSISTENT! Prior to this statement, Kessaris, Lewis, and others have said unequivocally that NO protections were allowed at all under the previous versions of the Design Manual.

7:58 Lewis: “It [the proposed rules] reflects that what was in place the previous 35 years is still possible. But what it does is it cuts down on the process. If you have some trees that you want to protect, you can do that within these prescribed standards without going through any process.”

FALSE! The stated ability to protect shrubs and wildflowers over the “previous 35 years” IS NOT “still possible,” as Lewis claims. And even with respect to trees — if you want to protect a Quaking Aspen, you’re required to apply for an “exception” to the Design Committee because — believe it or not — the new rules do not define a Quaking Aspen as a “tree.”

8:17 Gerhard Beenen (Board President): “So, one clarification, I just want to make sure I understand is that, prior to June 14th, 2023, could you go to the Design Committee and ask for protection of plants [he emphasizes “plants”], not trees?”

8:29 Kessaris: [Gestures to Lewis for an OK] “You could. Yes, plants, shrubs, or trees.”

INCONSISTENT! See above.

Beenen: “OK”

Kessaris: “Right”

Beenen: “And now, with the proposed language, can you go to the Design Committee and ask for protection plants, or is it just for trees?”

Kessaris: “Just for trees.”

Beenen: “OK, so that’s one change.”

Kessaris and Lewis: “Yes. That’s one change.”

Beenen: “That is a change. We just need to be sure that everybody understands.”

COMMENT: Kessaris confirms, with Lewis’s tacit agreement, that the new rules TAKE AWAY owners’ prior rights to protect native shrubs and wildflowers on their own property.

9:20 Director Clark Pederson: “I have some comments I’d like to read for the record.”

COMMENT: A long soliloquy ensues with myriad misrepresentations and irrelevant “calculations” to dismiss the value of owners’ comments.

Pederson: “It might be of interest to note that the word “wildflower” is not part of the actual document” [He’s referring to the Consolidated Plan of Sunriver.]

FALSE! Just download the document — “wildflowers” is right on page 5.

12:44 Pederson falsely states that owners to whom postcards were sent were a “select” group of only 174 people, which is less than 2½% of 4,174 owners. In fact, postcards were sent to 500 owners, 400 of whom were randomly selected. Of course, he neglects to say that the 10 owners who supported the proposal are less than 1/5th of one percent. The true ration is 10-to-1 — there were 104 unique comments (no duplication of owners or lots) opposed to the new rules and 10 in support.

Pederson: “The vast majority of residential areas in Sunriver don’t allow fences.”

MISLEADING! Fences abound around condominiums. The total length of all these fences is undoubtedly far, far more than the total of fencing material used to protect native plants own owners own properties.

Pederson: “It is our fiduciary responsibility to represent 100% of the owners.

CLUELESS! Pederson seems to forget the estimated 200 or so owners who value protecting native plants. The “fiduciary responsibility” reference is pure baloney. There is no significant, negative financial impact on the SROA. However, there is potentially a negative impact on the homeowners who lose their native plantings to deer and beaver predation.

16:12 Director Bill Burke: “I made the mistake of going through several dictionaries and looking up the term ‘wildflowers’ [laughing] it’s not planted things. It’s things that are in the wild.”

NONSENSE! This is one of the most ridiculous attempts to diminish the statement in the Consolidated Plan of Sunriver that “wildflowers … are a community treasure.” Perhaps Director Burke should inform the famous “Edgerton and Stengel Wildflower Garden” that their garden doesn’t actually have a single “wildflower” in it.

Burke: “That miniscule population [of opponents to the proposed rules], in my opinion, while a person has the opportunity and flexibility to do it, it was ill-guided [sic], centered around self-interest, and it doesn’t build community, it divides community.”

UNCIVIL! If you can even parse this jumbled statement, it’s a highly offensive and “ill-guided” denigration of owners to whom Director Burke is referring.

Derogatory comments like this and completely ignoring owners’ opinions is seriously divisive.

24:15 Beenen: “If we vote the rule change down, the Design Committee will go back to the June 15th, 2023 [manual], which doesn’t allow anything. So, the up-down vote is do we want to allow homeowners, without input from the Design Committee to do a certain amount of tree protection or do we want everything not allowed, no protection at all allowed.”

MISLEADING! The Board could have simply kept the current suspension of enforcement in place and directed the Design Committee to revise their recommendation to allow protection of shrubs and wildflowers.

25:06 Kessaris: “When they were looking at tree protection, they were trying to look for consistency. That’s the reason the rules are proposed the way they are, so that way as part of our mission statement, blending in with the natural environment; if it’s consistent protection, it’s going to blend in better than everyone individually doing their own type of protection.”

NONSENSE! Having unnecessary rules that are overly specific and which will require owners to waste money, time, and resources replacing perfectly reasonable, existing protections with something the Design Committee cooked up with no on-the-ground evaluation is not going to make a whit of difference in “blending in.” As an example of what doesn’t “blend in,” consider irrigated turf lawns which stand out like sore thumbs in Sunriver’s Lodgepole/Ponderosa forest.

27:28 Beenen: Again, there’s a lot of consternation, but there’s a built-in exception. And there is a built-in exception on this process also, with respect to tree protection.

MISLEADING! There is NO “exception” in the new rules that would allow owners to protect shrubs and/or wildflowers.

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I’ve personally served on multiple boards and have never seen the level of willful disregard for facts and the constituents’ opinions that each board is supposed to represent.

But this effort to protect and promote sustainable, native landscapes is far from over. Stay tuned!