[Villages Kahuna]

Think of it this way. If you were the developer and bore the costs of building all the golf courses and recreational facilities, how could you get your money back, yet still maintain control over their maintenance and the quality of the recreational programs?

Like a lot of other things in TV, I think it was a stroke of genius whereby the developer sold all the rec facilities and golf courses to the central CDD, which he controls because he owns all the commercial property in the central CDD's. (The voting rights for the CDD supervisors go to the property owner.) The central CDD's have bonding authority and issued bonds in an amount sufficient to pay off the developer. Our amenity fees are used to both provide for the rec activities as well as retire the bonds. The POA folks will differ with me because when sold, the developer clearly didn't provide enough money in a sinking fund for deferred maintenance. But even that's now corrected by the developer's agreement to settle the POA lawsuit before it went to trial.

In essence, the developer sold the golf courses and rec centers to himself, with the residents of TV providing the money with our amenities fees. If you think about it, if the family really "wanted out" of TV as we're now within 7-8 years of build-out, why wouldn't they have simply sold all those facilities and property to a new owner? The cash flows from those facilities are pretty significant and selling them would present no problem whatsoever. There would be all kinds of commercial real estate companies, pension funds, hedge funds, etc. who would have lined up to present a bid. That would really have been a risk to our lifestyle.

So to a degree, we have to have some confidence in the developer that he will do as he says he will, and not sell off all the commercial properties in the soon-to-be three central CDD's, thereby giving control of all the golf courses and rec centers to the new owner(s). He has said that TV is in the Morse family DNA and even though all the houses might be built, they'll still have a huge investment in the commercial properties in and surrounding TV and that they're not going anywhere.

Is the family legally bound by that statement? No. But until now, they have certainly conducted themselves admirably in creating a community with the lifestyle we all so enjoy. In my opinion, there's no more risk that there will be significant changes in our lifestyle or the costs of living here than there is in the communities we moved from. Frankly, there's probably less risk of something like that happening given the control of a responsible developer.