Our Village

Three times over the past decade the Board has made decisions not to close the Rental Office. The first time they made one condition for staying open, it cannot cost the Association money. Well we all know that didn’t happen since Association members now are subsidizing around $30,000 annually so those few who rent through the Rental Office can make a lot of money.
We’ve been told twice we now can’t afford to close the Rental Office because office figures show the losses would more than double each year.
So being a simple man help me out here, surely I'm missing something. Could it be the answer was given at our February board meeting?
After President Montalvo expressed his frustration with Aramark on acquiring flow charts, Director Sandberg added similar ones and believes that in keeping two set of books, one for LIV and one for Aramark, it becomes a total nightmare to get an answer on even the simplest of things like how much did we spend on Verizon last year.
She couldn’t believe the paper trail that Aramark requires an Association bill to travel. For instance, Verizon sends their bill to the Welcome Center. The office manager opens it up and gives it to the GM for approval. The GM sends it back to the office manager so she can enter it into Aramark’s system and you would think that should be it, right, cut the check and mail it, right? Not so fast, after it's been entered into Aramark’s system the bill now travels to the Aramark people in Pennsylvania where they purge it for processing in order to make a check out to pay the Verizon bill in our behalf. So now we’re done, right? Wrong, a month later the Pennsylvania people will have to send our office a statement requesting a reimbursement for their efforts and our office now has to go back through their set of records to reconcile Aramark’s numbers. When this is all said and done, the office will show in Aramark’s system that the reconciliation has taken place and our office can now make a check to pay Aramark.
In short what normally takes any other office five minutes to pay a simple phone bill, our office takes an hour and the Association has to pay that employee for that time. To do all the items that flow through the office this cumbersome way it would not surprise me that Aramark has required the need of more office employees. Take as many guesses as you want as to who would pay for that and while you're guessing, who has to pay for the services of the people in Pennsylvania? Even President Montalvo said after reviewing his cash flow reports that he feels our Village is paying Aramark $110,000 a year for the most part to pay our bills, little else.
So one might find it interesting if this may have everything to do with losing $70,000 per year if the Rental Office were to close. Is it time for our Association to wake up to Aramark.
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