The CotoBuzz Journal, Community Journalism

Institute was added to the community’s vernacular as part of an initiative by the property management company to indoctrinate new board members about the workings of PCM and all their various departments and functions. In some circles, this is referred to institutional memory, in other circles, this is referred to as brainwashing, consistent with the Stanford Prisoner experiment.

Looking into the workings of a board through the eyes of allegedly blackballed and recently elected United Mutual of Laguna Woods Village director Mike Curtis, may help find the answer. However, in the name of full disclosure we should note that it is widely known that Mr. Curtis is not only an outspoken critic of how PCM manages the community affairs, but also, a couple of years ago, Mr. Curtis filed a defamation lawsuit against PCM, United Mutual and the Golden Rain Foundation after PCM went to great lengths to get him fired from his job as an engineer at Raytheon, according to court documents. Eventually a Confidential settlement was reached that is characterized as mutually acceptable.

During the board meeting last week, and just at the beginning of her presentation, Janet Price, the community’s CFO asked that all questions be held to the end. According to an account written by Mr. Curtis in an email:

In some cases, instead of discussing what her departments actually do, she proceeded to critique accounting law and California law requirements for reserve funding. She said things like Sarbanes-Oxley, the new accounting rules that came out of the Enron scandal, were too expensive and going to drive our accounting costs up. In the middle of a similar rip of the method of developing and substantiating the reserve funds, she pitched that the State was requiring confusing and unnecessary calculations.

Tired of her junk about how these rules and laws don’t help us and only cost us money, I interrupted and said; “Don’t criticize the law, tell us what you do.“

With that, several board members shouted out for me not to interrupt.

Bob Miller, sitting in front of me, turned around, yelling at me, then reached over his chair and took a swat across my leg. I said to Bob; “You hit me. Why’d you hit me?” Ruth May, sitting with Bob, got up and started screaming at me; “No he did not!! He did not touch you!!” I called her a liar … she knew it happened, and so did Bob. Ruth went out to get Security, Bob sat down, and the meeting continued.

A few minutes later Gene Hart, our crack security manager, came in and sat down next to me. Later, during a break, when I was speaking to Bob (as we sat in our chairs, I said “Bob, you shouldn’t really go around hitting people …“), Ruth came up and started yelling at me again until I told her to “hush” (that drove her nuts! - she acted like a prize fighter coming into the ring and ready to deck me! Other had to pull her off.).

It was very interesting, and uncalled for, to see how these board members responded to my simple interruption of Janet Price. Janet could have handled my interruption just fine. Instead, certain board members, I guess, considered it their duty to protect Janet and thought nothing of jumping in and interrupting and yelling at another board member … the same thing they recently voted not to do.

Gene Hart’s name seems to come up regularly in this discussions. So we asked Mr. Curtis if had registered an official complaint, and his response was philosophical:

“I’m living with whatever they want to pull regarding use of Milt Johns’ personal security man, Gene Hart. They’re looking for any/every way they can to make a case to have me removed from the United board, and I’m just playing easy … not making anything of it. As far as I’m concerned, he can follow me everywhere … they just look stupid doing it.”

So, the question remains, who is managing the asylum….er…the Institute?

Posted in Laguna Wood Village, Politics, Fiduciary Responsibility | No Comments »

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