Dear Editor: Please help our Berkeley Section 8 housing project find new Board members!

27 years ago, our wonderful Berkeley Section 8 housing project was founded as a co-op where each of its 57 families held a share which apparently entitled us to convert to condominiums and actually own our homes once the mortgage was paid off.

That dream has vanished. More and more, it's looking like our mortgage will NEVER be paid off.

About 20 years ago, our co-op Board of Directors was taken over by a group of residents who ran it with an iron hand. The co-op feeling disappeared; we were forced into receivership for non-payment of taxes; we went through approximately eight management companies who were either fired when they disagreed with the "Board" or quit in disgust; the once-prosperous co-op, well on its way to paying off its mortgage, went downhill financially and the physical structures went into decline as the "Board" focused on -- to them -- the more critical issue: How to pursue their own self-interest.

However, with the help of our local community, this wonderful housing co-op might still be able to get back on its feet! We are having an election of five new Board members on March 3, 2007 and most residents here are either too intimidated or too fed up to run for a seat. But according to our much-ignored bylaws, you don't have to be a resident of the co-op to run for election.

So. Will anybody from our community who is impartial, with no personal axe to grind and can at least count to ten PLEASE consider running for our Board of Directors? We only meet one night a month!

Please call the Savo Island Co-operative Homes, Inc. site management office (841-4595) and tell them you are interested in running. Or call me -- at 843-0581. And thanks.