September 14, 2020
Board Statement Concerning the Play Date Lease Decision
Dear GDRA Members,
We did not make this decision lightly, particularly during the pandemic and school closures. As community members and parents we know that daycare is a great service to any community. This is not a decision any of us wanted to make; unfortunately, we did not find any alternatives. This is not a decision about Tyler and Play Date. It would apply to any daycare. We want the best for Tyler and the future of Play Date. We hope he is able to find a new location to continue Play Date’s School Age program.
Since March 2020, the HOA Board has devoted many meetings and hours of discussion to the issues of allowing a private daycare to use the clubhouse. These meetings were discussing a contract with a private business; therefore, they occurred in executive session as provided by law. This is to protect the privacy of the business being discussed. We reached out to legal experts, insurance experts, and HOA management consultants. After consulting with these experts, the Board determined it did not make sense to continue to allow this private daycare to operate in the common area. There were many factors that went into this decision, and the Board hopes that you will trust your elected directors who take their fiduciary obligations seriously. We as a volunteer Board did our best to weigh all of the information and consider the interests of the HOA.
We informed Tyler of the potential issues in June 2020 and July 2020 and told him we were working hard to find a creative solution, but that we might not be able to find one. We continued to search for any kind of solution and proposed countless scenarios to the experts. There was no viable way to allow a daycare to operate in the clubhouse. For example, the options considered that might have made the daycare possible would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, or more, that all of the residents would have paid through assessments, and even then it would not have resolved all of the issues. Even if we chose to ignore the advice of the experts, continuing to host a daycare would incur significant ongoing financial and resource costs to the HOA.
After six months of trying to find a solution, it became clear that the GDRA does not have adequate resources to allow a daycare to continue using our facilities. A public statement was not initially made out of respect for Play Date and Tyler. We thought it best to allow him to control notification of families. We also wanted to make sure that we gave him time to try and find a new location and therefore did not end the lease until the end of December 2020.