Steve Burgoon, TLIA President
October 2019
Hello, Neighbors!
The year 2019 has been very challenging for the Association with regards to protecting our privacy. As a Board we are here to help preserve our Association’s safety – of our financial assets, our property assets (lakes and grounds) and our information assets. In the winter we had an un- precedented level of trespassing on our lakes, principally from fishermen who learned about our
lakes from uninvited, non-guest “Youtubers” who took videos ice fishing on our lakes then posting sponsored videos. This unfortunate situation resulted in the Lake Committee, working with VOTL Building and Zoning and VOTL Police to install 12 new “No Trespassing” signs at various, visible locations near entrances to our lakes. We expect these signs will make it more obvious to trespassers that they are not welcome while also providing VOTL PD the opportunity to more readily approach trespassers and ask them to leave. The Lake Committee has published our protocol on how to handle suspected trespassers on the lakes. CLICK HERE to see March 2019 newsletter p.1
Throughout this year we have also experienced other intrusions of Association privacy to include email phishing of TLIA board officers (President, Treasurer, Dues, etc.) and outside visitors at our Santa on the Island. Recently a TLIA member asked the Communications Committee to remove all reference to their name and address from past TLIA Newsletters as their company has a new corporate policy restricting public access to their personal information. Coincidentally, the company I work for this month instituted a new 4-hour on line “Cyber Security Training” to identify the MANY ways hackers and “phishermen” try to access our personal information by linking into emails, passwords, cell phones, social media posts, etc.
Lastly, we completed the third-party certified audit of our financial records, receiving no major deficiencies. The complete Audit will be presented at the Annual Meeting in January. However, the audit firm did recommend removing or password-protecting all of our financial documents on our TLIA website. The Finance Committee made that recommendation to the TLIA Board at the September meeting. Accordingly, the Communications Committee has met a few times the past five months and brought recommendations to the Board at the September TLIA meeting. In reaching these recommendations the Committee reviewed other local HOA websites for best practices. Over the next few months the Communications Committee and the Board will finalize our go-forward plan to limit access on the website (tlia.org) to all sensitive information including all financial documents, By-Laws, calendar, etc. This will require some expense (capital) to create password-protected access to this private information.
As mentioned earlier in the year and at the beginning of this column, your Board is here to first and foremost protect our Association’s assets – Property, Finances and Information. TLIA is the collection of 360 private households in one Private Association. We will continue to work hard to invite family, friends, and guests to enjoy the community we love. In this ever-expanding world of information, technology and instant access, the Board will act to protect our Association’s privacy.
See ya around the neighborhood