MISSED OPPORTUNITY

For those of you who may not know this, the Las Colinas Association recently missed out on a tremendous opportunity to provide a wonderful educational opportunity to the residents of Las Colinas. Thanks to the effort of many people, including our own Nell Anne Hunt, The Las Colinas Association was given the opportunity to “partner” with Uplift Education, the organization that created and operates North Hills Preparatory School, nationally ranked by publications such as Newsweek and The Washington Post as one of the very best high schools in America, to start an elementary school in Las Colinas that, unlike North Hills Preparatory School, would have restricted admission to children who resided within the boundaries of Las Colinas. To get this school started and hopefully other schools to follow, Uplift Education required land to build the campus on and a funding commitment of $500,000.00 per year for five years by a specified deadline.

Unfortunately, The Las Colinas Association could not make this commitment by the deadline imposed by Uplift Education because, in the opinion of their legal advisors, it lacked the power to provide funding for education in its Articles of Incorporation, as opposed to its providing educational services. Article Four of its original Articles of Incorporation adopted back in 1973 permitted The Las Colinas Association to “provide educational and entertainment services.” Pursuant to this power, for a long time we residents enjoyed cable TV service provided by The Las Colinas Association. Using this analogy, while The Las Colinas Association could provide cable TV services, it lacked the power to pay a cable TV provider to furnish its residents cable TV service. While this may be viewed a splitting hairs over a technicality by some, a strong argument could be made that the powers of The Las Colinas Association, like any corporation, originate from and are limited by its articles of incorporation, i.e., “if it isn’t in there, you don’t got it”.

Proposal No. 1 of the upcoming proposals that you are being asked to vote on in April can change this so that The Las Colinas Association will be in position to help financially support quality educational opportunities for the children of Las Colinas residents in the future. By amending Article Four of the Articles of Incorporation to allow The Las Colinas Association to provide funding for “corporate, public, private, quasi-public, or quasi-private educational institutions and/or services,” hopefully, the residents of Las Colinas and their children will not again miss out on a superior educational opportunity like the opportunity we had with Uplift, should one become available in the future.

I believe that passing this amendment is a no-brainer; however, I respectfully disagree with one thing Nell Anne said about Proposal No.1 in her blog, namely,“in order to vote on education, you also have to vote to ‘provide entertainment services’”. The Las Colinas Association already has this power. It has had the authority to provide entertainment services along with educational services in Article Four of its Articles of Incorporation since 1973. The proposed amendment to Article Four of the Articles of Incorporation does not change this, however, the important distinction that needs to be made is that the proposed amendment will authorize the Las Colinas Association to also be able to provide funding for educational institutions and services only, but not for entertainment.

MARTIN KAHN