Is there someone at Pulte who FINALLY "gets it"?

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"The customer is always right."

Who hasn't heard this before? While I've always taken it "with a grain of salt", I can see the wisdom behind it.

If you treat your customers well, then they'll continue to be your customers. And, they'll create new customers for you, by telling others how well that you treated them. Others will want the same treatment.

On the other hand, the opposite is true. If you treat your customers poorly, then not only will they walk, but they'll tell others of their poor treatment, and those who have "never darkened your door" NEVER will do so.

Nordstrom revolutionized department store business in the 1980s with their "the customer is always right" creed. Stories abound of their GREAT customer service.

Have the "old" ways been forgotten?

Maybe not entirely. There's been a "shake up" of Pulte personnel at SCHH. Do you think that someone at Pulte may FINALLY "get it"? Let's hope so.
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"Chihuahua with no teeth"

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In his column entitled "Bureaucracy working against water quality" in today's (8/28) Bluffton Today, Joe Croley says: "The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control should, from a practical point of view, be a spokesperson for the river but by and large allows any request from mini-marinas to elongated docks to be approved. If they see themselves as a watchdog, they are a Chihuahua with no teeth: small, noisy, but largely ineffective."

You got that right, Joe! In my 40+ years as an engineer NEVER have I seen an agency charged with protecting the environment do such a poor job as DHEC. Look at their miserable record with the lagoons here as a case-in-point.
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Pulte treats their customers like morons... Well???

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Pulte doesn't take responsibility for their words and actions, and insults our intelligence in doing so.

There’s a problem with wood flooring that Pulte installed—it’s because the homeowner used a common desk chair floor protector, prohibiting moisture coming THROUGH THE SLAB from evaporating. C’MON!

EVERYBODY here should know that the Phase 5 lagoons are a mess, yet there’s an article in this month’s Sunsations, written by BOD member Francisco Garcia, patting Pulte on the back for their wonderful lagoons and their praiseworthy stewardship of our wetlands. You’ve GOT to be kidding me!

There are problems with our stucco. In a letter dated March 26, 2008 Derek Morgan tries to tell us that the holes at the base of our stucco clad walls are “NOT FOR DRAINAGE”. MASTER BUILDER, or master something else?

I guess to his credit, Jon Cherry did admit that removing hurricane clips from valley truss connections was “probably a mistake”, but did Pulte step forward to install said hurricane clips in houses that they built here after 2004, but before early 2007, when they started installing them again? NO.

In a coup de tat Pulte takes back a resident BOD seat, and gives it to a Pulte employee. When Jon Cherry is asked why, no plausible explanation follows. (Even when residents had more members on the BODs than Pulte employees, residents publicly acknowledged that Pulte, with their veto power, controlled the BOD.) Pulte, is it that you think that we can’t handle the truth? Guess what? With SOME of us, you’re not hiding a thing!

The AMAZING thing to me is how Pulte keeps getting away with treating us like morons.
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Pulte promises to fix lagoons

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from http://www.islandpacket.com/news/local/story/733671.html :

Sun City developer promises to remedy lagoon problems
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Sun City Hilton Head developer Pulte Homes on Thursday promised to fix problems with a number of lagoons in the gated community at no cost to residents. That promise was made to about 550 residents at a meeting organized by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

"We stand ready to do this work, we've started to do this work ... and it's not going to cost you a nickel," Pulte spokesman Jon Cherry told the audience.

When folks here paid premiums for lots on lagoons, they weren’t buying this:

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Or this:

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Never mind the fact that DHEC isn’t doing its job, as evidenced by the fact that as-built drawings show that these lagoons weren’t built according to the construction plans that DHEC approved, that Pulte pumps sediment laden water into wetlands, and that untreated stormwater runoff from the Hidden Cypress parking lot flows directly into the adjacent wetland (the one with ACRES of dead and dying trees), Pulte OWES it to the folks who paid premiums for lagoon lots to fix them ALL COMPLETELY AND CORRECTLY.

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Herd mentality

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Remember Jonestown, Guyana? It was the settlement of a California cult, The Peoples Temple, led by the charismatic lunatic Jim Jones. On November 18, 1978, 909 cultists died in the settlement after Jones encouraged them to drink cyanide-laced Kool-aid.

Herd mentality is alive and well in America today. Examples of herd mentality include the early adopters of high technology products such as cell phones and iPods, as well as stock market trends, fashions in apparel, cars, home décor, and retirement communities. Herd mentality is the failure to act as an individual, with intellect and reasoning.

The Jonestown propaganda of retirement communities today comes in sales rhetoric and slick self-serving publications. It comes from developer-imposed websites that carefully control information that is given to residents. It comes from strictly controlling what can be placed in our private lower mailboxes. It comes from developer-approved, propaganda-filled emails that are sent to all in the community.

Herd mentality prevents us from thinking for ourselves. It prevents us from looking rationally at situations and from determining the truth. It makes us slaves. We don’t think for ourselves. We don’t speak for ourselves. We simply follow the herd, right into the slaughterhouse.

An extreme analogy? Or, is it?
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Where's DHEC?

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Two examples of DHEC NOT doing their job:

Example #1
Pumping sediment-laden water into wetlands is a violation of the Clean Water Act.
http://schhphase5lagoons.blogspot.com/ CLEARLY documents Pulte doing this. Where’s DHEC?

Example #2
Directing UNTREATED stormwater runoff directly into wetlands (NOT routed through a treatment pond) is a violation of the Clean Water Act. Go to the storm inlet at southeast corner of the Hidden Cypress parking lot. Now, go 20 feet to the east and see the pipe coming from the inlet discharging directly into the wetland (the dead and dying one). Residents here told DHEC of this violation MORE THAN TWO YEARS AGO. DHEC SHOULD have known about it without having been told. Where’s DHEC? Untreated runoff from the HC parking lot STILL continues to be discharged into the dead and dying wetland RIGHT NOW, and yet DHEC does NOTHING.

BOTH these violations have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with storage capacity of the lagoons, and yet Pulte and DHEC continue their moronic mantra “…400% of the required storage volume”, like there’s nothing else involved in protecting the environment than providing adequate storage volume in the ponds. (BTW, the 400% ONLY applies if the lagoons were built according to the approved construction plans, and we know from the as-built plans that they weren’t.)

Finally, I attended meetings with DHEC & Pulte at DHEC’s office in Beaufort. Before the meeting started DHEC staff and Pulte people talked with each other like old business partners, ignoring everyone else in the room. It spoke volumes.
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