Orange County Register

After learning that the muckety-mucks at Professional Community Management charged more than $116,000 on credit cards paid for by seniors in Laguna Woods Village last year, some seniors started yelling, “Cut those %&&!&% cards up!”

(One PCM manager charged a $982 meal at the Claim Jumper restaurant in Laguna Hills to fete his workers at holiday time. The same day, PCM general manager Milt Johns charged $858 at the ocean-view Las Brisas restaurant in Laguna Beach for same. Feel the love? Click here and here to read those stories.)

Anyway, it created such a stink that some residents cried “senior abuse!” and called for a forensic audit of PCM’s books.

FAST FORWARD ONE YEAR ….

LWV residents haven’t gotten far on that forensic audit bit, but they have made some headway on the shred- the-credit-cards thing:

• Before, nine managers held credit cards that the seniors paid for.
• Recently, my colleague Cheryl Walker reported that that number would shrink to two.
• One of those cards will remain in the wallet of PCM head honcho Johns, of the $858 Las Brisas charge.

GREAT NEWS, RIGHT?

The seniors will pay a price for the shredding of those seven credit cards.

Nine cents per household, per month, to be exact.

Why? Because PCM’s credit card charges paid for ”employee support expenditures,” meant to boost morale so seniors get good service from happy, productive PCM employees.

Since most of the cards are gone, these keep-em-happy expenditures will now be built into the management fee that seniors pay PCM to run their community. Before, they were directly charged to nonprofit GRF accounts. (Thousand-dollar lunches and nonprofit status …? Didn’t sit well with some LWV residents.)

So how much money are we talking about here?

• An extra $1.08 per home, per year.
• Since there are nearly 13,000 homes in Laguna Woods Village, that adds up to an extra $13,755 per year that seniors will pay to PCM.
• That money “will offset the tax impact of certain expenses that are not fully deductible for PCM,” said PCM’s Heather Rasmussen.

It would also pay for 14 or so very nice meals at $1,000 a pop….

AND THE TOTAL IS….

Drum roll, please. With this $1.08 per household per year increase, the total management fee paid by LWV seniors to PCM is $654,121, said Rasmussen.

That’s up quite a bit over the last five years. The Watchdog is waiting on some numbers, we’ll discuss why in the coming days.

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