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‘Till Death Do Us Park
Before launching into any analysis, it is important to commend our Board of Directors — Jerry Waldman and Eric Mandelbaum in particular — for distributing both the Garage Waiting List and the Garage Parking List to shareholders. These lists have been the source of many questions of fairness and process, and opening them up to scrutiny goes a long way towards addressing those questions. Hopefully we'll see the Storage Room Lists next.
According to Eric Mandelbaum, the Garage Waiting List was compiled based on at least eight distinct versions of the list, and represents the very latest version of the data. Further according to Mr. Mandelbaum, there are many automated checks that will prevent invalid records from being added to that list (such as adding someone who already has a spot). Finally, Mr. Mandelbaum reports that this version of the list is the "official" version — that henceforth, the database will be maintained as the authoritative source of information.
I mention all this as a means of contrast; the story of the Garage Parking List is not so promising. Although the format of this list resembles that of the waiting list, the content of this list was provided by Rudd, and may or may not have been extracted from a database. Few checks (if any) are in place, as is evidenced by seven errors.
- Two shareholders on the list are deceased. Carlos Rosado pointed out that the spaces of these shareholders have long since been reallocated.
- Five shareholders listed as "recent graduates" on the Garage Waiting List are not listed on the Garage Parking List.
It is Rudd's responsibility to manage shareholder billing. If they can't generate an up-to-date list of shareholders who are using the garage, it stands to reason that we are losing revenue.
Beyond this, these errors raise another concern — an automated process which checks to see whether someone is already parking before putting them on a waitlist needs to have an accurate list of parkers to refer to. Inaccurate data on one list thereby compromises the data on the other.
As guardians of our fiduciary interests, our Board should investigate these errors on the parking list to (a) ascertain in what state Rudd is maintaining our data, (b) confirm that billing for parking commenced (and ended) at appropriate times, and (c) ascertain that our process of managing our garage is robust and coordinated. Furthermore, our Board should extend this analysis to billing or our other shared resources — Storage Rooms in particular.