A Joint Message from Oakland Mills Community Association Board Chair Jonathan Edelson and Oakland Mills Columbia Council Representative Karin Emery
Dear Residents and Friends of Oakland Mills,
Recently, the Columbia Association (CA) completed its analysis on what it would mean for CA to take over management from the Columbia Villages of the 24 buildings located throughout the ten villages. These 24 buildings include The Other Barn and our three neighborhood centers. The CA Senior Leadership Team (SLT) presented their findings and made recommendations to the CA Board of Directors on February 27th. The CA Board of Directors will be voting on these recommendations on March 27th.
If the board votes to accept CA’s recommendations, It would start with CA providing a centralized booking system and collecting all revenue from events, and then disbursing the revenue to the villages. CA already controls the funds you are paying in assessment share to live in Columbia and determines what the villages get. We believe this proposal for the facilities further erodes OMCA’s fiscal autonomy while creating an additional and unnecessary layer between our staff and those who are trying to use our community facilities.
The legal and financial relationships between CA and Columbia’s villages, including Oakland Mills Village, which is formally known as the Oakland Mills Community Association (OMCA) are too complex to describe in every detail in an email. Basically, you, as residents, are members of OMCA. The covenants on your property are unique to OMCA, and the processes to gain approval to alter properties or to enforce covenant compliance are OMCA’s responsibility. The only members of CA are its 10 board members (the elected Columbia Council Representatives). CA collects an assessment share from you based upon the value of each property and disburses a portion of that to the villages. This enables the villages to perform required HOA functions and to provide other services while also enabling CA to maintain Columbia-wide amenities such as Open Space.
The other source of income for both OMCA and CA is facilities. CA owns and manages facilities such as its gyms, pools, and both the ice rink and the Youth and Teen Center here in Oakland Mills. CA owns, and the villages manage, other facilities. These include The Other Barn and the three Neighborhood Centers here in Oakland Mills. OMCA, like the other villages, has managed these facilities for many years under a series of management contracts, and we have been responsible for setting prices, managing bookings and leases, making non-capital improvements and repairs, and generally ensuring the buildings entrusted to us are well-run and well taken care of.
Our OMCA staff is proud to provide a personalized experience to everyone using our facilities, and online reviews validate our personalized approach. We also pride ourselves, as a non-profit organization, on setting reasonable rates and even donating use of our facilities when needed for community events like back-to-school meet and greets, townhome association meetings, and PTSA or booster meetings. We put the revenue from paid events right back into Oakland Mills, where we provide low cost or free events such as our annual pool party and annual fall festival, where we invest back into our facilities for things CA doesn’t cover like new kitchen equipment for The Other Barn, and where we invest back into the community through donations and other support.
We believe this proposal before the CA board is a solution in search of a problem, and we hope you agree that OMCA has been a good steward for the buildings under our management and has provided service and support to the Village of Oakland Mills beyond the basic covenant functions of an HOA.
Our Village Board will discuss this matter further at our meeting on Tuesday, March 11. We hope you will join us and provide feedback, either through resident speakout or by emailing Village Manager Brigitta Warren at manager@oaklandmills.org. We also hope you will let the rest of the CA board know how you feel before they vote on this matter at their March 27 meeting.
Thank you for considering this, and we welcome your feedback.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Edelson
Chairperson, Oakland Mills Community Association Board of Directors
Karin Emery
Oakland Mills Representative to the Columbia Association Board of Directors
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