Speaking at the Incline Village Crystal Bay Republican Women’s Candidate Forum May 14, 2024
There are many things we all want from our community and things I feel I am uniquely qualified to address.
First off, as most of you know, our Finances are a Mess, and we are one step away from Nevada putting us under their scrutiny and Financial Watch. So, before we can do anything we need to address and fix this foundational problem.
Our financial reporting is months if not years out a date; we need to have accurate, timely and digestible information routinely available for the decision makers and the community. I will insist on the generation of monthly budget status information, such as I had to create as a project manager, that can be explained in one to two figures to anyone in the community. Not the hundreds of pages of monthly ledger printouts that are currently provided.
Over 2/3rds of our full-time employees have access to an Incline Village credit card without real approval or accountable procedures. As described in the recent Forensic Due Diligence report this and many of our current financial procedures are prone to High Risks of Fraud. We need to reduce the number of cards to a limited number of managers and team leaders, and institute increased oversight and verification of the expenditures.
Our people are not trained in the usage and procedures of our accounting system acquired two years ago. This is unacceptable! We need to ensure our IVGID leadership in each of the departments is fully trained and capable of using this accounting system and can train their appropriate team members. Every transaction must be verified, justified, and recorded correctly in the accounting system. In my years as a NASA employee we had our accounting systems changed many times, as a best practice senior managers were trained first to ensure a successful implementation.
Our personnel costs have increased over 25% year-over-year with no noticeable improvement in performance. This is unsustainable! Currently actual personnel expenses are busting our budget made just a few short months ago. We need to institute a goals-based employee performance system with trackable metrics to achieve expected outcomes, as I always utilized as a NASA employee and supervisor.
We need to recruit, hire and train a well experienced General Manager that is a proven leader and has broad financial knowledge to guide the day-to-day operations of our community. In my NASA career I had the opportunity to recruit, hire and train many managers and leaders who all had successful careers of their own.
We need to get the long-delayed incline beach house upgraded. The lack of adequate restroom facilities, especially for women and the routine utilization porta potties I find unacceptable, unsightly, and unsanitary.
This simple project has been going in circles for many years and has seen the costs grow from $4,000,000 to currently $16,000,000 due to what I believe is gold-plating and not understanding the real needs.
I plan to ensure the designs are adequate with the priority on restrooms for our needs not a 4-Star level professional kitchen that is only open 4 months, but something safe and usable for our actual needs. We might even want to consider an outdoor kitchen, since the major costs of indoor kitchen’s is all the fire suppression and venting necessary for indoor kitchens.
l will push for this project to be on every agenda to ensure timely completion.
Summer parking, especially with the boats has made our community very difficult to navigate and too crowded. I believe we could solve this problem by opening the Diamond Peak parking lot for boat/RV parking on a permit basis, and maybe even make a few dollars from this activity.
Finally, our recreation center is in desperate need of overhaul. I believe we need to provide a two-pronged attack, first address many of the deferred maintenance and safety items and a limited reconfiguration for current needs and activity. Secondly, we need to invest in an overhaul plan with our community input to enhance our Recreation Center for our current and future needs.
These will be a major focus of my initial tenure as trustee.