Tidelines

Candidate for the SIPOA Board of Directors –
John Sesody

I moved to Seabrook from Scottsdale AZ in January 2016, a full time resident My home is located at 2991 Hidden Oak Drive, in the Hidden Oaks HOA.

Past Governance experience:

• President of the Fairway One HOA in January 2016
• Currently serving on the SIPOA Communications Committee and have also served on the subcommittee charged with improving transparency and effectiveness in our annual election process.
• Currently the Hidden Oaks representative to COVAR.  
• Co-founded a Grief Support group here on Seabrook.
• Member of the Seabrook Island Village volunteer group, designed to assist our owners with successful “aging in place”.
• Served 6 years as president of the Dartmouth Place HOA (part the Quechee Lakes Landowners Association – QLLA) located in Vermont.
• Currently on the Golf and House committees of QLLA.

With over 50 years of hands on executive and management experience and my current and prior Association governance experience I believe I can be a valuable contributor by serving on the SIPOA Board.  It is time for me to give back to our community and help continue our successful growth as we face the challenges of tomorrow.

After just under 4 years living here Seabrook has become a very special place for me.  The strong sense of community and the clear commitment of so many have convinced me that I made the right decision to move here.

• I believe that the SIPOA Board should commit to small but more frequent discussion groups to encourage the involvement of a broader segment of our owners.
• I believe the SIPOA Board should commit to more interaction with COVAR by establishing a permanent Board representative for COVAR to encourage that very large owner segment to participate in and “buy into” SIPOA planning efforts.  Having served as COVAR representative for two HOA’s I see this as a real opportunity for us.

In reading the Common Vision and Core Value Statement of SIPOA these words jumped out at me:

TRUTH AND INTEGRITY ARE THE CORNERSTONES OF OUR COMMUNITY

With service on two committees here I have seen those words in action.  I hope to be able to participate in this ongoing process and make a real difference in our future.

-Submitted by the SIPOA Nominating Committee

Candidate for the SIPOA Board of Directors –
John Kinne

My wife Lisa and I bought a cottage in Tarpon Pond, one of the regime associations on Seabrook Island, in 2007 as a secondary home.  In December, 2017 we moved to Tarpon Pond full time. For 8 of these years I served on the Board of the Tarpon Pond POA as Vice President. 

Notable accomplishments included:

• Cancelling the existing policy of POA-controlled painting of all the regime cottages and returning control to homeowners; expanding the range of color standards with a clear set of rules / guidelines as to frequency and paint quality
• Commissioning an audit resulting in the establishment and funding of ~$60k of unrestricted reserves with a total reserve balances of over $100k
• Working closely with SIPOA and SIC to improve serious, and worsening, drainage and flooding problems
• Landscape moves to sustainable plantings with an island “character” and to mulch from pine straw for water conservation
• In-depth review and revision of Standards 

In late 2018 we bought our current single-family home on Loblolly Lane and sold our cottage.  As of July 31st, 2019 I am fully retired.

Professional career highlights included: 

• Sales / marketing / business management / executive management
  • as a Global VP at Atotech Corporation I was responsible for business / product strategy
  • as VP, Americas for Atotech I had full P&L responsibility for Atotech’s operating companies in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina
• Over many years I was involved with different Industry Trade Associations – serving as committee member, committee chairman, Board member, Vice President and President
  • While serving as President of MFSA I was part of a 12 person “Executive Committee” charged with developing a plan to merge three separate industry Trade Associations (MFSA, NAMF and AESF) into one new Association (NASF)
    • • I served as Vice President of NASF for the first 4 years of its existence
      • In 2008 I was the sole recipient of the NASF’s lifetime achievement award

These experiences, all requiring effective management of large numbers of people and cooperative action with Board Member peers and committees will enable me to make positive contributions to the residents of Seabrook Island.

My number one priority for SI relates to existing, and worsening, drainage and flooding.  Current efforts, now in the study stage, need to be concluded and recommendations acted upon diligently.  With increasingly active storm seasons we need to focus on the safety of SI residents, to aftermath clean-up, and to infrastructure maintenance and improvement.  I also believe that SI property values are sub-optimal – we need to understand how our property values are moving in relation to comparable communities and the reasons why.

We love SI and I would like to invest my time / energy / skills to improvement.

-Submitted by the SIPOA Nominating Committee

Candidate for the SIPOA Board of Directors – Ian Millar

My wife, Joy, and I have been property owners on Seabrook since 2003 when we bought a lot and then started building a house. The island commended itself to us for its natural environment, its sense of community, its weather and its proximity to Charleston. It still does. We have been residents since 2004. I’m retired. We have three children. 

My college education led to degrees in physics, business administration and climate science. An entire career in business saw me consulting for, and running, companies in various parts of the world in a variety of industries: semiconductors, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, banking, power generation, healthcare, packaging and paper.

With that experience, I’m very comfortable generating data and analyses as well as dealing with issues involving finance and strategic planning. My personal contributions to the SIPOA Board’s policy making would involve discussion and decision making based on resident input, interactions with residents, context, fact, logic and a long term perspective. The experience I have had on both the General Operating & Maintenance Committee (GOMC) and the Long Range Planning Committee (LRPC) means I am already familiar with SIPOA’s strategies, policies and issues.

With the benefit of my committee experience, I believe I have an informed perspective on the issues SIPOA should be wrestling with in 2020 and beyond. I would make the case for a “Top 10” of issues that includes include two associated with different types of flooding, a couple associated with growth, and three on infrastructure maintenance and development. I also believe we should develop a strategic perspective on where Seabrook wants to be on the Community-Resort spectrum. Obviously we are more “Community” off-season and more “Resort” on-season but clarity on what we want the overall balance to be out into the future would better inform policy and spending priorities.

Lastly, there are a couple of pieces of context for Seabrook sea level rise (SLR) that I believe we should discuss, agree on and make explicit. The data over the last 100 years from Charleston Harbor’s tide gauge show us the SLR trend has been steady. SLR has been making (and will continue to make) itself felt on Seabrook through increasingly frequent nuisance tidal flooding over time. In gradually adapting to the evolving impacts of SLR over the medium and long term, SIPOA will have to spend significant amounts of money on road and drainage infrastructure. Given the importance of that adaptation, I believe that we should have an explicit, non-inflammatory assumption of what rate of sea level rise we are planning for. Next, a significant proportion (some 30%) of sea level rise on this stretch of the coast is attributable to widespread subsidence caused by groundwater pumping. Seabrook and (even more so) Kiawah have been pumping groundwater from local wells for the last 45 years or so, mainly for (or to supplement) golf course irrigation. As we begin to adapt to the impacts of sea level rise, I believe we should confirm and acknowledge that this significant proportion of our local sea level rise is largely of our own making.

-Submitted by the SIPOA Nominating Committee

Contractor access to Seabrook Island will be restricted from Thursday, November 28 through Sunday, December 1, 2019, for the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

As prescribed in the SIPOA Rules and Regulations, Section VII. COMMERCIAL/CONTRACTOR RULES, B.  Contractors may only perform Emergency Work on the following Holidays:

• New Years Day
• Easter Sunday
• Memorial Day
• Independence Day
• Labor Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas

Further restrictions apply to the days surrounding these holidays:

• If the holiday falls on a Monday or Tuesday, contractor access will also be restricted from Saturday through the holiday.
• If the holiday falls on a Wednesday, contractor access will be restricted to the holiday and on the Tuesday immediately preceding the holiday.
• If the holiday falls on a Thursday or Friday, contractor access will be restricted from the holiday through Sunday.
• Work by contractors is not permitted on Sundays, holidays or other days designated by the Board, except by special arrangement with SIPOA.

For purposes of this section, Emergency Work is defined as work that is required to address immediate fire or electrical hazards, plumbing leaks or other conditions requiring immediate attention, the delay of which would cause risk to life or health or significant damage to property.

To view the SIPOA Rules and Regulations, click here. Contact SIPOA at publiccomment@sipoa.org with questions or comments.

–Tidelines Editors

(Clipart: www.hellasmultimedia.com)