The Tellico Village Property Owners Association Board of Directors voted March 6 to make Steve Schneider its newest member.
Board members Richard Blough and Cap Purvis motioned and seconded with the vote passing 6-0 before the start of a regularly scheduled workshop.
Schneider replaces Sue Tinder, who won a seat during the 2016 election and resigned last month due to an unknown personal reason.
“When Sue resigned, first thing we did was take a look at the governing documents, more specifically the bylaws to see what the board was allowed to do or what should we do,” Bruce Johnson, POA board president, said. “Basically, the bylaws provide for several different scenarios. One being we could just leave it vacant for the next 20 months. We didn’t want to do that because our workload dictates that we have seven members. We’ve got a lot going on this year and we wanted to make sure we had a full board.
“Second thing it said is you could hold a special election to either fill the remaining term,” he added. “We really didn’t want to do that because the complexity surrounding the election for the other candidates, two positions coming open this fall.”
Ultimately, board members decided to appoint someone they felt right for the job.
“We felt like there were a lot of good people in the Village that we could use as a interim person, and we talked to a few, but most of the people that we talked to that had experience in the Village and served in other capacities, they just weren’t quite ready to get involved at that level yet,” Johnson said. “... Well we knew that all of the people that appeared in last year’s election would more than likely be interested in being on the board because obviously they had run for the board last year.
“So in that regard several of the board members felt like Steve, who had almost as many votes as the people that won, finishing a very strong third position — we basically felt like there were a lot of people in the Village that wanted Steve to be on the board,” he added. “So we measured his abilities against some other candidates that we had in mind and since he had a strong backing in the Village we felt like that he would be a good candidate for this.”
Schneider was not surprised when POA representatives asked him to fill in the remaining 20 months of Tinder’s term.
“There were five people running for two seats last November,” Schneider said. “All of the candidates except me are, I’ll call them long-term residents, who have been here 10-15 years. Me being here for about a year, I came in third and I missed out on the second board seat by I think it was 37 votes. The next closest competitor was, I don’t know, 200-300 votes out.”
Schneider hopes he can bring his expertise in finance to the board. Schneider’s career spans 35 years with Alcoa and Century Aluminum Company, and included various operations in finance, procurement and executive managing. His last assignment was as senior vice president-chief accounting officer and controller for Century Aluminum Company.
“My skill base adds to the existing six board (members) because everybody obviously, these are volunteer positions, so everybody brings their own background to the board and there’s no one on the board that has the financial procurement IT experience that I have,” Schneider said.
His focus as new member will be to help the board develop a long-term strategic plan based off property owners’ needs for the next 10-20 years. He also hopes to help support the Village’s current amenities.
