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Health & Fitness

Our Clandestine Association

Yet another inducement to "get involved." But not too much.

It may well be that I am the only person in Reston that actually watches the meetings of our leaders being replayed on Channel 28 twice a month.  But it never ceases to amaze me that, for at least two years and probably longer, trying to keep up with what these worthies are planning for the rest of us is almost impossible.

The first question ought to be why the RA Board meetings aren’t shown live, as the Fairfax County Supervisors, Planning Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals.  (I confess I’ve been known to actually watch them too and CSPAN BookWorld on weekends.  Yeah, I know, I have no life. But we digress.)

Friday night is the least-watched night of television, so replaying the RA Board meeting that night almost eliminates the chances that anyone channel surfing will mistakenly find out exactly what they are hatching for the rest of us.

After repeatedly alerting the RA staff and the Board by e-mail to the horrible sound quality and curious color effects (sometimes it's a green filter, sometime yellow) during most replays for more than 24 months, the sound levels have become steadily worse.

What’s truly amusing is watching RA Board members hamming it up for the camera but, because most of us skipped lipreading class, few of their words are intelligible.  And they’ve been told the sound isn’t working for years.  Do they forget about the lousy sound quality from one meeting to the next?

We are left with the conclusion that both the RA staff and the Board of Directors don’t really want us to know what is being done with our assessment money or who is being sued or not being sued on our behalf to uphold the sacred Reston covenants.  They just want to make it look like they want you to know.

That conclusion is reinforced by the quaint practice the Board has of discussing all the juicy stuff in executive session.

“What’s the basis for executive session, this time?” a member has been known to inquire.  The trusty Assistant Secretary is reliably quick to offer, “Contract matters.” If you think only modestly hard, you’ll soon come to see that everything that RA does involves a contract of some kind.  The covenants are a contract, after all.  Therefore, the entire Board meeting is ripe for executive session whenever the spirit moves these pillars.

Of course, if one waits in the hall outside the meeting room for the executive session to end, one can’t help but hear that most of the time in executive session is spent gossiping about the people who dared to attend the RA Board meeting in person.  No special listening device needed.  Several voices boom through the imported drywall.

“If you really must know what we’re up to you can always find our agenda on the RA website.” I dare you to find the Board agenda on the RA website.  Julian Assange couldn’t dig it up.

And good luck finding a copy of the Board package if you show up to a meeting in person.  If more than five members show and you're the sixth person there, you are totally lost.

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If it weren’t for Karen Goff, we would be completely clueless on what these potentates are up to.

Having cut my local government teeth in New England town meetings forty years ago and after trying to encourage more openness and transparency by the RA staff and the RA Board for more than 2 years, a rational member is left to conclude, they really don’t want the membership to know what’s going on and are damned determined to keep it that way.

After sharing these thoughts with my cluster mate Bob, he said, "You're looking at this all wrong.  RA is actually very small, very private club with secret handshakes and passwords and the rest of us are junior members left to press our noses against a darkly tinted glass."  And my neighbor wasn't joking.

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Maybe this will be a subject covered Monday night at the Uncontested Candidates Forum.

"Probably not," says Bob.

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