EV just posted new information on
Facebook:
RESPONSE TO MISINFORMATION ON TUGBBS:
I, Melanie Goocher, do NOT own any of the weeks or the names registered. I was hired to do admin work while my husband was hired to manage the unit renovations. We have been working with The Oakes Group and Eagle Village for a year. (more on the timeline later). It was brought to my attention that a photo from the PA records was posted in TUGBBS to "prove" that I had somehow "cut John Oakes" out and took ownership if the resort names and am buying units for $1. Here is the FULL photo. You can see that I am the account holder who registered the names. If you look in the bottom right hand side you will see they were registered to TAMIMENT TIMESHARE ASSOCIATION. I do NOT own these nor do I own a single interest in any of the units. The person making most of these allegations goes by the name FloRidaTraveler2007 and I believe use to be one of John's ex employees at Poconos Park and they are trying to stir the pot by committing slander as they also did during that meeting where they were screaming and escalating things.
Now, for details on the events of Eagle Village as what I know...(this will be long but thorough)
I began working for The Oakes Group last July 2024. My job was to clean up the records, figure out why the resort was losing so much money, find a solution to recover the deeds for the 1400 defaulted owners, get bids to make the needed updates. Hence why I registered these names because while searching title records we realized that for the past 40 years deeds had been registered to names that did not exist in the PA records. During this time we were noticing that the employees were only working 3 hours a day while being paid for 40 hour weeks. They weren't answering calls, returning calls, returning emails, etc. Many of you made these complaint so you are well aware of that situation. We also noticed there were people being paid that in several months of being on site, we never even saw work there. We made note of lack of maintenance being done even though two family members of the ex manager were being paid for maintenance. Gary in recreating was working 5-8 hours a week and being paid for 40 for example. The board at that time would not listen to any of this for one and for two, one of them didn't even have an email to respond to issues and it took months to get an answer on something. We had to make a change in order to be able to fire employees who were committing wage theft. John Oakes started paying ALL of the bills at Eagle Village completely in October 2024. EV had run out of funds from the previous years maintenance dues so John took over the payments. At this time, we started looking at all of the bills thoroughly as this is when we got access to them. Many of them were several months behind at that point. The Oakes Group paid several hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket over the next few months before 2025 maintenance fees started coming in. The agreement with the Board was that he'd be repaid for any expenses he covered.
As we started having more issues with the management/employees and finding more issues we knew we needed to be able to make changes to save the owners money in the budget. THIS is why the meetings were volatile. The board and the ex management did not want to be fired but they were a cog in trying to fix the issues. The employees weren't doing their jobs and the board refused to let us fire them. We needed a new board. The meetings to do this were UGLY! We put a new board in place (no John's girlfriend is not on the board!)
At this time (Jan-February) we had also experienced the freezes and outages with Met-Ed that caused a transformer to break (I posted photos of this repair previously), all renovation worked stopped because for one we had no electricity for a couple of months in the units were were working on (3 full renovations units) and for two, now this put us on damage control with the freezes because all the pipes and plumbing fixtures in every unit to bust. Mind you, at this time, we still had to work with the previous employees. They were in charge of maintenance. We couldn't even get one of them who was living on site to go shut of the water to keep the water bills from going crazy. We ended up sending one of The Oakes Group employees who was doing renovation work over to shut everything off. I've posted videos of the water leaks before as well. Once we got power back, we started the repairs of replacing everything that was busted or damaged. Below in an example of just one of the units. This was done by The Oakes Group employees and John was paying the expenses to do it. So yes, at this time renovations stopped because we had so much damage to repair.
After the board was changed (March) we sent the new board the documented issues with the employees with dates and details and they approved us letting them go. Aliyah stayed on board and we brought back Griff for maintenance because he was maintenance prior to the last few years when the previous management decided to hire her brother and son. Other than that we cut a lot of costs by keeping a ghost crew and having the call center we had previously hired to answer calls. We also fired Concord because that was costing somewhere around $60,000 annually to the owners. Our call team started making the calls to owners as needed for a fraction of that cost.
Because the water was allowed to run during freezes in December, January, and finally the last one I believe was February, (we didn't take over the maintenance until end of February when we made the decision that they needed to be fired) the water bills had run up extremely high. We sent requests to the utility company that the work was repaired and to requested credits on the bills. They haven't credited as of yet. I don't think they're going to. But because of this they are owed $100,000.
Due to all of the excess expenses and some major work that we have had to deal with, the board made the decision to shut down for a couple of months to try and deal with insurance claims, getting utility costs down, and working through what needs to happen. It was costing $50,000+ / month to stay open and the income wasn't covering even a portion of this. We expect to be open again in the Fall. Anyone who lost their week (and didn't use RCI) will get a make up week once open.
Now, the other claim is that I've collected 500 deeds with a deed transfer offer sent by email. This is untrue as well. This deed transfer program has been in effect at Eagle Village long before John or I were even working with Eagle Village. I don't know about prior, but I have been given records dating back to 2021 from Resale Closings. I believe at this time it was solely offered to hardship cases. 2021 had 68 transfers, 2022 had 50, 2023 had 63. We came on board officially at the end of June 2024 and opened it up to anyone who wished to deed transfer could regardless of hardship because of the RCI issues and the many owners complaints. So 2024 had 153 and in 2025 there's been 214 thus far. This is mostly people who had balances or defaults, deceased owners, and some current owners as well who just didn't want to own anymore.
In 2025 there were only about 500 paying owners. Everyone else was delinquent or defaulted. We were told that in 2024 there were 1100. We do not know if this is correct. This is not enough money to keep things open or maintained but letting defaulted owners just keep the deeds to where we can't do anything with them is not a solution. So there has been a big push with collections to retrieve those deeds and save the association money in foreclosure proceedings.
I have had several owners reach out to me to complain about the price that Resale Closings was charging and the time it was taking to complete the transfer. In some cases it had been 4-5 months. (It's a small operation and it takes a lot of work to get them completed. Plus Frank had some health issues that got him a little behind). In addition, people were angry that the resort is closed currently. Therefore, in the last 2 weeks we sent an offer to owners who wished to exit that we could do it in house for $960. This is to pay the employees handling the calls and emails, the person (Dakota) who is doing the deed preparation and the costs to record. No one has to do this. It is not to hurt anyone. It was literally offered as a response to fix the problem for the numerous complaints we received associated with exiting the timeshare. That's all. If you wish to do it, please do, if you wish to hang in there and wait it out, by all means, please do. Also note, this is an in house offer and not associated with Resale Closings.
Now a response to the final misleading comment on TUGBBS regarding Barbara Woods. Barbara contacted me when the outages occurred and informed me that she was living in a unit and had been told by previous management to pay her in cash. I do NOT know what is true and what is untrue as I was not a part of any of this. Woods made claims that we intentionally shut off power and water to that unit. (outages) What I do know is that I informed her that we are not a long term rental and that her living there and paying $400-$500 a month would COST the other owners money and that was unacceptable. I told her we could make a temporary arrangement while she found another place to live. During the maintenance teams visit to the unit to work on the damaged pipes, they discovered it was very nasty and there weren't any items of value. Just a bunch of trash and food so it didn't appear to actually be lived in but more of just used so we locked it. I do have photos if I need to post to show this. I asked her to arrange a time to pick up the few items of clothing and anything else she wanted to grab. She would not set a time and instead went to the AG, posted on Google and other other forums to say we wouldn't let her have her things. Again, she was removed because she was costing the owners money and I don't see any records of her actually paying anything in the past other than one credit card statement she sent to me from a year ago.
My personal company is being slandered over this as well. So I'll get into that too. We have vacation rentals and we do fix and flips. Which is why we were asked to come assist on this because we know how to renovate on a budget and we know hospitality. In August 2023 our company experienced natural disasters in TN that wiped out several of our properties. Insurance denied the claim because it was "soil movement". One of our daughters had postpartum psychosis and completed suicide in October and then in April 2024 another natural disaster completely took out another rental in Oklahoma. We STRUGGLED mentally and financially which is also why we agreed to take this position to come help Eagle Village. I did not file our company taxes for 2023 or 2024 on time and that business is listed as not in good standing because of this. I have since filed 2023 and working on 2024 however that business is shutting down and most likely filing bankruptcy over the losses because I am tired of fighting the insurance companies. None of that matters to anything with EV but since a lot of false and slanderous information is being stated about me and my business I am just putting it out there.
Again, the board is working on options and we will send any notices or updates as we have them.
