SaveTheHill.org

First Election Attempt Deadline Sept 16 by Kevin Wine, Sep 13, 2025, 5:32 PM, reply, branch, edit

This is a reminder that the first attempt at holding the 2025 Annual Election is scheduled for this Tuesday, September 16th, 2025 at 7PM in the Clubhouse. The quorum requirement for this first attempt is one half of the owners in good standing, which is typically around 240 owners. In all the history of Society Hill, the election has never taken place on the first attempt. I was told that around 170 units opted in for electronic voting, so maybe we will have some more voters in this initial attempt, but I would be very surprised if it is over 240.

If you still haven't voted and have a paper ballot, the instructions are available on page 2 of this link:

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Samples/2025Instructions.pdf

If you lost your entire election mailing, or never received it in the first place, I was recently advised by management that there is no way to provide replacement election materials and you will have to come to the meeting and vote in person. This will be totally impractical for many owners that don't reside in the Hill. In this case you can instead download a copy of the proxy form here:

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Proxies/Proxy2025.pdf

And complete it following the instructions on page 2 here:

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Samples/2025InstructionsBox2.pdf

This will give your proxy holder the right to vote for candidates of their choice at the annual meeting. In the example I show me as the proxy holder, but you can appoint any other owner in good standing who will be present in person at the election meeting. If you do put my name, I will obviously vote for John Fakla, Zahid Khan, and Vincent Marchitto, unless you direct me otherwise.

While I'm sure the current board leadership and management will not like this method of voting, it has been the practice here for the last 15 years and is perfectly legal. Only a few owners do this every year, except when Tong Zhou and Linda Zhou had control of the board and they would be handed a stack of 40 to 50 such proxies solicited from their supporters. Even if your proxy gets rejected because they don't like it, that's fine. The point is to get it submitted, and if it ends up mattering we would sue to get it counted.

The Self-Management Debate
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In the eleventh hour, I see that the board leadership is finally trying to engage me in the self-management debate. Have they finally given up on their strategy of rumors, lies, and character assassination? Apparently they have recruited another owner to author a flyer critical of the self-management concept. Here is a copy in case you missed it:

https://www.savethehill.org/Election/Samples/Flyer464.pdf

I could go on for 5 pages picking apart their copy/pasted lies and distortions but most of you have probably already heard them from me. I will point out a few obvious things though. This owner, Christina McGeough, bought her unit on Harwick Ct. in May of 2022. She was not here in the management company days prior to 2008, or the self-management days from 2008 to 2018. Not being here to see all the problems that led up to going self-managed in 2008, and not being here to see how it worked for 10 years, leaves her is a somewhat compromised position to be commenting on self-management in Society Hill. I assume her source is the current board leadership, Mohiuddin Syed, who also is a very recent new owner from April 2021 for both of the two units he owns, and who has a very distorted impression of the past he never directly witnessed. According to him absolutely nothing good happened in Society Hill from 2008 to 2018. It was all trash - everything we did.

The thing that bothers me about this election, and should bother all of us, is the level of manipulation that is going on. The ballot "mistake" with a missing candidate, the board's internal secret vote to not correct the paper ballot, the fact that 2 of the incumbent candidates directly voted on that decision, and then threatened to remove me from the board for telling you, the screw-up in the order of the candidates on the ballot, the refusal of any election oversight, deciding the election inspectors will not be counting the ballots (!?), forbidding the board to review the ballot before mailing it out, the banning of 2 other candidates from candidate's night, the biased moderation, unsolicited emails going out to owners, no way to get a replacement proxy/ballot/envelope, moving the election from October to September when I'm crazy busy at work, the "divide and conquer" political strategy, and finally them gaslighting me over my concern for fair elections.

And these are just the things I know about. As I said before, and was recently confirmed, 95% of what this board does is done behind the scenes. Worse yet, it is done with a sub-set of the board - not all the members are included. The current board president Mohiuddin Syed is making all the decisions and the board meetings are just a procedural charade to make it appear otherwise.

The $97/month fee increase, and the inevitable future increases, are the result of shutting out opposing views, cancelling debate, fracturing the community and the board, censoring criticism, and trusting the wrong people. Maybe they would get away with it if they really knew what they were doing, but they don't. As a result they have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on unnecessary over-kill projects in just the last few years, and every few weeks they come up with another way to waste several thousand dollars more. The latest is they want to spend $10k replacing the entire front door to the clubhouse so the manager can have an electrically operated lock on the door to "buzz us in". As the owner's comments say, the current board is all-in on the industry "professionals" who will shamelessly lead their faithful board member lambs to financial slaughter. There are other ways of repairing and replacing the common elements. There are other ways of creating revenue and providing services for less which they continue to mock and which their ignorance will prevent them from ever understanding.

I assume everyone has noticed the destruction of the pavers on Buckingham as the township is replacing some of the curbing along the street. While this isn't a Society Hill project, our property taxes (which have recently gone way up) are paying for it, so it's still money out of our pockets. They just can't leave the pavers alone. Now they have ripped up every end of every section to replace it with concrete and the tactile bumps for the visually impaired. This is yet another example of how money is wasted. There are special "bump pavers" which could have easily been substituted in for some pavers to satisfy the ADA requirements. Most of the curbing that was replaced was not in bad shape. I suspect President Syed had a hand in this somehow..

Kevin