Columbia Association faces uncertain future as CEO resigns
The Columbia Association’s board of directors has accepted the resignation of President and CEO Lakey Boyd “effective immediately.”
“The board thanks Lakey for her service and contributions and wishes her well in the future,” the board said in a news release announcing her resignation Thursday. Boyd declined to comment.
Board member Janet Evans, of the Long Reach village, and general counsel Michael
Aniton, also submitted their resignations Thursday, confirmed Dannika Rynes, the association’s senior media relations manager.
Evans is the third board member to resign in the past three months, following Kevin Fitzgerald, of Town Center, on Nov. 2 and Shari Zaret, of Kings Contrivance, on Dec. 22, further destabilizing the organization’s leadership structure.
“There is some responsibility to be shared on both sides, however, I do not believe the majority of the [Columbia Association] Board has accepted any accountability for their role in creating the contentious dynamic nor their failure to legitimately find a solution and create the steps to achieve it,” Evans said Friday in a text message. “My decision to resign was driven by that lack of accountability and lack of trust in current board leadership.”
Board Chair Eric Greenberg, of River Hill, did not respond to requests for comment.
Rynes said Aniton provided “no public statement” as part of his departure.
The brief news release capped Boyd’s tenure at the nonprofit association that serves as the quasi-government of Maryland’s second-largest city. It followed months of speculation that the board was seeking to force Boyd out.
The board issued its first public remarks regarding the controversy Jan. 6, saying it had delivered a plan to “improve the relationship”
with Boyd.
Though she did not discuss details of the document, Boyd said in a Jan. 11 statement that the plan rendered her “ineffective in being able to carry out my duties as president/CEO” and requested that the board transition her out of her role. The timeline of such a transition remained unclear until Thursday.
At a regularly scheduled public meeting held hours after the announcement about Boy’d resignation, the board voted 6-2 to put out a request for proposal to find firms to conduct a “global search for a new CEO.” Board members Andrew Stack, of Owen Brown, and Bill Santos, of Wilde Lake, voted against the motion. Both Stack and Santos previously voiced public support for Boyd.
During Thursday’s meeting, the board also voted unanimously to accept its audit committee’s recommendation to use “mediation provided by an independent, qualified third party” to increase transparency between the board and association senior staff.
Stack, who sits on the committee, said he unsuccessfully pushed for the measure for months in an attempt to salvage the board’s relationship with Boyd, but the vote came too late to stave off the CEO’s departure.
During public testimony, residents pleaded with the board to adopt more of the audit committee’s ethics and governance recommendations and to postpone the selection of a new CEO until April, when seven of the board’s 10 seats are up for election.
Volunteer board members represent Columbia’s 10 villages, each of which has its own electoral model and usually only sees voter turnout in the hundreds.
“As a community, our opportunity for transparency is the election process,” said Brad Butler, vice chair of the Owen Brown Village board. “You’ve got capable staff that can sustain the day-to-day operations through April. Let the election play out and then choose a CEO.”
If done right, Stack said, the search process should take months and a new board should select the next CEO.
“What is required now, in my opinion, is a change of focus (maybe even a change of heart) by the current CA Board of Directors,” Stack said in a statement Thursday. “The CA board must understand and acknowledge that the relationship between board members and between CA staff including the CA president must be collaborative and not dictatorial.”
The Columbia Association operates as a homeowners association for Columbia, a planned city of more than 104,000 founded in 1967 by real estate developer James Rouse. The association board manages a budget of $70 million, as well as a range of community amenities, from pools to jogging trails. Boyd began as CEO in May 2021 after relocating from Alabama and was hired on a four-year contract.
Upon assuming office, Boyd joined a number of local groups including the Howard NAACP and quickly drew praise for her open leadership style and bridging gaps between the historically insular association and the community. She prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, writing an October letter that called on residents to question why inequities persisted in Columbia despite the city frequently earning national quality of life awards.
“I have never seen this community as excited about a dynamic leader for the Columbia Association,” Oakland Mills resident Lena Kennedy said. “To just blow it all, it’s so devastating.”
Stack said he believes the board’s tension with Boyd primarily revolved around communications issues.
“I’ve heard good things about her actual performance in terms of the job,” he said. “The biggest complaint that I hear is board-president interactions.”
Rumors about the CEO’s job security mounted after an Oct. 27 public meeting in which Boyd asked the board why a community member had approached association Vice President Dennis Mattey and asked him about filling the role of interim president.
Former board member Russell Swatek has pointed to Boyd’s initial hesitancy to disclose settlement documents from a costly 2020 lawsuit over Columbia’s annual Symphony of Lights holiday display as a contributing factor to the frayed relationship.
As speculation intensified, dozens of residents testified at meetings in support of the embattled CEO, accusing the board of micromanaging Boyd, wasting fiscal resources on a potential ouster and failing to publicly announce closed meetings. Since September, the board has spent $40,000 on outside counsel provided by the firm Ballard Spahr and attorney Tim McCormack, according to Rynes.
While the board has yet to comment on why it hired McCormack, board members held a closed meeting in June to discuss “hiring outside counsel to assist the Board with addressing the President/ CEO’s appeal of her FY22 performance evaluation.”
“During the summer, over my objections, a majority of the CA Board chose to hire a lawyer,” Stack said in his statement. “In my opinion, one hires a lawyer when your focus is adversarial; one hires a facilitator when one’s focus is on collaboration and finding mutually agreeable solutions.”
Former board member and longtime Columbia resident Joan Lancos said buying out the remaining two years of Boyd’s contract and the potential legal ramifications could cost the association upward of $1 million. The association is funded, in part, by annual fees paid by residential and commercial property owners.
“This is a huge loss for Columbia,” said Erika Strauss Chavarria, executive director of nonprofit Columbia Community Care, who led a rally in support of Boyd earlier this month and petitioned for a recall of five board members. “We are continuing the plans we had moving forward and ensuring we have a new board come April.”