|
Dear Homeowners,
Attached you will find the audited reports for the years 2014 and 2015. These reports were made by accredited auditors from Grant Thornton and show the income and expenses from the community budget.
As you will see the level of the calculated costs per property per month is well above the current community charge of USD 310 per month. This is caused by on the one hand higher costs than budgeted and on the other hand the fact that there are too many non paying properties which are accounted for as "bad debt" and as such push up the theoretical community charge.
We hope to share 2016 within 1 week with you.
As we started cutting back costs in 2018/2019 these reports are not an indication for future community charge levels. We have been limited by cashflow but were able to slowly reduce costs by either small investments or severance of staff in those years. In some cases financed from outside the community budget.
As the community budget has a cash shortage this entity was/is not able to do major investments in e.g. desalination or generator replacement.
As we speak a desalination plant with a daily capacity of 100.000 gallons is being installed. This is an investment of over USD 250.000 which has been paid by Orange. We are looking into replacement of the generators as the current installation has too many parts which are no longer available and thus potentially can cause long term outages of backup power. As written to you before we will solve the automatic switching and load shedding by the beginning of December. This gives us time to do a proper tender for the complete replacement of the backup generators.
There are a few important things to realize when going over these reports;
– the report shows costs like rent for several buildings/facilities to the community in order to be able to provide their services. As there is a cash shortage there is no actual payment being made from the community budget to development/Orange;
– These costs are solely for the services provide to homeowners. Any staff member providing services to the commercial center (e.g. installing an Air-conditioning unit in a rental unit) is administered on a work order and as such allocated as cost to development. The same goes for any work done by CDAL staff for Orange. Orange in principle hires these staff members. If we would not be able to allocate costs to "third" parties the community cost would even be higher as we would have times with too much staff on hand;
– Electricity is sold to homeowners with a surcharge on the APUA commercial rate. This surcharge pays for CDAL having the cost to provide the services (installation of meter, meter reading, invoicing, collecting, (did)connecting, etc) which in a normal situation would be provided by APUA. Contrary to what sometimes is stated this surcharge is not a profit for CDAL. As you can see in the audited report it flows back into the community budget. In other words, without a surcharge the community charge would have to be higher;
– The commercial center annually pays, regardless of the occupancy rate, EC$ 300.000 into the community budget. This is a contribution as if they were homeowners and covers, besides of infrastructure costs, costs like gardening around the commercial center, security services, garbage collection, etc. This is the equivalent of almost 30 "homeowners" paying community charges;
Audited Report 2014
Audited Report 2015
Kind regards,
CDAL management
Albert Hartog
René Boon
Wim Berends
|
