Good Morning. It is some years since I last had the opportunity to address the members of Birch Bay Leisure Park. It is nice to see that quite a few of the members who were at that meeting are also here today.
It is great to see that we are, every day, attracting new members and it is really to them that my remarks today are directed. At the same time, they will act as a reminder to all of us including those who have been associated with the Park ever since its beginning, that a tremendous amount of work and thousands of hours and dollars have been spent to get the park to where it is today. It’s continued success relies and always will on all of us and as Bev Rollo and Cec Bygrave keep reminding us “we can’t leave it to the other guy”.
We have to keep finding Directors who will work twelve months a year, Directors who are prepared to make decisions for the good of the park as a whole and the majority of its members and who are prepared to accept the flack that will surely be directed their way on anything controversial. I know of what I speak because our developer persuaded one of our members to send a letter out to the membership trying to stop me proceeding against him on behalf of the park. He even provided the mailing list and the stamps. This letter carried a number of signatures but not enough to organize a special meeting that Mr. Nelson, the developer, wanted. But believe me the flack hurt.
We must have Directors who recognize value for money and can balance the scales with the beauty and functional effective running of the park on the one hand against the frivolous use of money on the other. The keeping of the dues in line with the costs, and more importantly, the costs in line with the dues. We no longer have any ‘found’ money coming in from successful lawsuits or refunds of tax over assessments. The Directors must recognize budgets and live within them. We are now on a pay as you go basis and must ensure that every income dollar is carefully and wisely invested in the park for its present and for its future.
Before we as an Association move on, we should take one last look at the past and how we got to where we are today. After all, we are the only park of this kind in the Pacific Northwest that is in the black.
Let’s transfer ourselves back to August 1974. The developers of the park are beginning to turn over the running of the park and its control to members of the Association. We were to elect a Vice-president and a secretary. I was asked to run. The developers tried to stop me running by refusing to allow me to be nominated from the floor. We were ready for that maneuver and had copies of Roberts Rules of Order handy which were read to them and we forced a vote. I was nominated. The developers had a candidate running against me specifically. They must have had a premonition that if I was elected the proverbial fur would fly. My supporters, those that had encouraged me to become involved, decided that as I was to be out of the country when the votes were to be counted, they would provide their own scrutinizers and vote counters. I received a telex in Yugoslavia which just read "Congratulations we won”.
I was now Vice-president and Loretta Parisienne was Secretary.
This year sees the culmination finally of all the work that started on receipt of that telex until now, some 15 years later.
The first thing we did was to form an ad hoc committee to investigate exactly where we stood as an Association. The ad hoc committee was made up of a lawyer, Dave Leedham, a Union man, Gerry Hickok, a foreman, Gene Cole, a secretary, Loretta Parisienne, a Credit Union manager, Bill Hartley, myself, a businessman and an accountant. My first telephone call as I was trying to assemble this group to work with me for an accountant got me a ‘no reply’ so I moved to my second choice. I got all the names from our mailing list which at that time showed occupations. My second choice was at home and after a bit of arm twisting, he agreed to come on board. Thank heavens because it was Dave Rollo!
The concerns that had been expressed to me during the election campaign by members had to be addressed immediately.
1. Did we own the front 3 acres? We were told that we did.
Answer – No Richard Nelson, President of Leisure Parks Inc. had not signed the deeds on this parcel over to the association.
2. Had the members purchased the land free and clear of all encumbrances as we were told we had.
Answer – No. Richard Nelson had placed a $146,000 mortgage on the front half of the park in order to pay for the back half and had not paid it off. We Owed it.
3. How many sites were there to be. We had been told 365. What is now named Centre Way was to be the rear of the park. The other forty acres was to be an unrelated mobile home park at least that is what we were told at the time.
4. If this was true why did Mr. Nelson deed himself the right of way through our property, now called Mainline Road. What would this do to our security and privacy? This deed has been removed.
Answers – The Health Department had only approved a septic tank system for 365 sites Surprise! Surprise! Leisure Parks Inc. went ahead without approval and doubled the size of the park to 718 sites. The road easement was then truly to create a right of way through our property for a mobile home park that was to be completely unrelated to us …on the property behind Fern Road to provide access to Birch Bay Drive.
5. While we are on the subject of land…. Were we built on our own property?
Answer – No, not wholly. In fact, Mo Knight’s lot T.R. # 22 was half on Jacobs Landing at the back and half on Jacobs Landing on the side. The next-door neighbor wasn’t even in the Park. This went down the north side and across the back. We had to go and get a Quit Claim Deed to clear it up, not too easy when Nelson owned part of the land to our north, east of Centre Way and along our east boundary.
6. When we bought in, we were told that sewer was included but initially we would have 45-gallon barrels in the ground for waste water, and honey buckets to remove sewage and dump it at the bathhouses. Okay so far but what we were not told was that it would cost each of us about an extra 10% on membership cost at that time $200 and then we found we were left to pay over $120,000 to the sewer authority when Birch Bay got its own Sewer System.
7. Was the Park financially sound? That was a laugh. Nobody had any books or records and we were probably bankrupt, but what we didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us.
8. Members had 10-inch pictures on 16-inch T.V. screens, refrigerators kept burning out compressors all because of poor electrical and trying to run 718 sites off a system for 365. We wondered how long it would be before G.E. noticed that all warranty problems were coming from one park… and quit replacing compressors.
9. How come the park wasn’t finished – most noticeable lack of fences?
Next thing we needed was a Constitution made by us for us. The Constitution we had gave all the land, improvements and buildings back to Richard Nelson in 25 years, or to be a little more dramatic in 6 years from now…In 1995 you would have had to buy your membership back again from Mr. Nelson if he still wanted to keep the land as a trailer park. This had to be changed, but how? He wasn’t about to give that opportunity up, and as his wife said later, we had taken away her retirement fund.
Well, at the General Meeting there were a few papers that Richard Nelson had to sign and somehow it got signed too, changing the Association to 50 years duration, the maximum allowed under Washington State Law at that time and at the end of that time reverting, to the members in good standing… you youngsters can fight about what you do with it in the year 2010. I don’t expect to be around.
Of course, we needed new Rules and Regulations that were designed for the benefit of all members rather than to be used to sell memberships. That of course also applied to the dues. Can you believe they were $60 a year…no wonder we were bankrupt!
At the General Meeting held in May 1975 Gene Cole, Dave Rollo, Loretta and I ran for the Board and were elected. We were joined by Gord Simmonds, a policeman, Jim Cameron, a school principal and Don Billings, an assessor. Based on our new Bylaws, Loretta and I had to run again as we had changed the Bylaws to elect 7 Directors each for two years, four one year and three the next. At this time, I became president.
This Board went to work to correct the items presented by the Ad Hoc Committee which was then dissolved.
Unfortunately, many other problems arose that we had not foreseen and if the present Directors think they have it tough those early boards had a couple of extra items thrown at it.
- They had to work every Saturday in the office to answer members questions and concerns.
- They spent literally days in meetings with lawyers and in court rooms for pre-trial
- discoveries, and there was one more position on the board called sewer patrol.
Today we have Hawaiian night and the Gong Show. Well we had Sewer Patrol Show & Tell. Each weekend in the summer we had to continually patrol the two septic tank fields looking for the first signs of sewage rising to the surface. We then rushed to the pump and switched fields. In case you didn’t know we had two drain fields, one Circle 17. Did you ever wonder why the grass in greener in strips there? And the other was in the front 3 acres.
It became very interesting when on long weekends we did this all night, if the Director stayed for one more drink before he went to take a look, he was more often than not up to his ass…ankles in sewage running down the road to meet him.
At times that year we were very nearly shut down by the Health Department. Remember we had twice the number of units on site than they had approved…knowing that it wouldn’t be long before the actual sewer was in, we did everything to keep it in check. During the night under the cover of darkness, we had tank trucks pumping out the holding tanks. We replaced all the drain tiles. To say we were up to our asses in alligators would be the biggest understatement of the year. And as our wives kept reminding us…this was Leisure Park…
It did make a change from the winter when we were tying boats up to trailers on many of the main roads. You couldn’t get to the circles off the main roads…. the joke about having lakefront property and not paying a premium was born that winter. In those days most of our roads were gravel or oil and gravel. We even saw deer swimming along Centre Way plus several large dogs, the loudest sound in the park was the croaking of frogs. It was not unusual to see people checking the park wearing hip waders. Several new Directors had been elected by this time, but I will not name them all in case I forget anyone. I will though mention Dot Joyce.
We endeavored to get Leisure Parks Inc. to settle these and other problems amicably but it was not be …we had to resort to the courts. This was a 5-year battle just to get our day in court, which turned out to be a week with five Directors, unpaid I might add, in court all week.
During this five-year period the Directors had to make decisions that were not necessarily the most popular but without revealing all our court strategy we had to bull our way through. We had been elected to run the park to the benefit of all members and in their best interests. I was accused of running a dictatorship and perhaps I did, but the course of action was clear and our fiduciary duty under the law as Directors was to protect the investment of all park members, so we would not deviate from our set course. Had we failed to do this the members would have been within their rights to sue us. Directors are insured against this today, we weren’t!
Dave Rollo and I were greeted by a wet and very cold park manager who was employed by Mr. Nelson one late wet and cold December afternoon who presented us with a million-dollar U.S. lawsuit each against us personally and one quarter million-dollar suits against each of our wives. A couple of months later they did the same thing again…this time though they served them on us all at home… they must have thought that we were a hell of a lot wealthier that we were…. I’m still not sure where I had two million dollars’ worth of assets, how about you Dave?
This manager by the way told me I’d better back off as it was dangerous playing against the big boys.
The result of the court case was all that we had expected. We won most of what we were after and in fact won a large settlement that we sort of threw in as an afterthought. To protect ourselves to make sure that we did in fact get the money we had been awarded we put a mortgage on the front three acres which we didn’t win in court but received some cash in lieu.
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised us, but Mr. Nelson continued to live up to his reputation. He sold the front three acres and received $100,000 from a rather naïve businessman with which to pay us. Needless to say, we didn’t get paid, so we had to sue the purchaser who the court decided had to pay us.
We also had a battle with the State regarding our tax assessments which required more pretrial discoveries and long meeting with lawyers. This required time in Court in Olympia, but it was worth it as we received well in excess of $100,000 back in refunds. Anyway, it’s a banner year for us we have been paid and we have paid off all our debts. We’re debt free and if our Directors invest wisely, we’ll stay that way, because we have some money doesn’t mean we have to spend it, as there is fast approaching the time when some major repairs will have to be made to the park. After all it is almost 20 years old and some of our improvements were expected to last about 20 years, and we must have the reserves to meet those expenses.
Well, all the crap, corruption and B.S. is now behind us and I’ve put my shovel away. I have condensed 15 years into 15 minutes and you all now know the background and what we all went through to provide what you see around you today.
I am proud to have been in the right place at the right time and proud to have been able to play a part in making Birch Bay Leisure Park the finest recreational association in the Northwest.
Let’s all work to keep it that way. I should like to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to all those members, past and present, who worked with me and all other Board members who helped along the way, particularly my wife, Hilda, who got to the stage of not wanting to come down to the park.
Thank you, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, for allowing me this time to remind all that the past made the present and the FUTURE, well, that’s up to all of US.