Yes, I've looked at the budgets many times and am well aware of this.Operating cost and Capital cost are separate budgets altogether. The budgets for each resorts are published yearly and are easily searchable. Being an HOA President myself, I've reviewed the SSR budget with great interest.
SSR has a 2024 operating budget of $77.7M and a capital budget of $19.8M with $54M in capital reserves. Operating expenses for the resort such as housekeeping, administrative, front desk, maintenance, etc, are spent and calculate separately differently from capital reserves which are used for roof replacements, interior refurbishments, external refurbishments/painting, pavement resurfacing, etc. Dues are calculated on each budget separately and added together (along with ad valorem taxes) to make up the total due amount assessed each year.
The largest operating cost is housekeeping followed by transportation. Budgeted for 2024, SSR has planned $26M for Housekeeping, $13M for transportation, $9.3M for Admin and front desk, $9M for maintenance, $8.7M for management fee, $3.6M for member activities, $3.6M for utilities, $2M for insurance, $1.1M for security, and just under $1M for taxes. There are a bunch of smaller budget items for DVC reservations, Fees to the Division (haven't researched that one), audit and legal fees.
Those are resort dues in a nutshell.
The point in the post you quoted was that these are still categories over which Disney has some degree of operational control. At DVC's inception, resorts like Old Key West and BoardWalk were budgeted to not have a soft refurb until they were 12 years old and the hard goods refurb would not occur until 25 years. Around 2016, leadership decided rooms could not withstand those timeframes and the schedule was accelerated to soft at 7 yrs and hard 14. This prompted an increase in dues across the board as collections went up to budget for the more frequent refurbishments.
Meanwhile, post-pandemic material and labor costs in the construction industry meant that near term refurbishments would cost significantly more than what resorts had been accumulating in their reserves for upcoming projects.
In the long term, wages, fuel prices, insurance prices, construction costs and a variety of other expenses will only increase. Those in turn will drive up member dues. Aside from playing hard ball with employees on their wages and benefits, the most direct way Disney could control those costs is by cutting staff or services. By running buses less frequently. By delaying refurbishments so that the rooms go longer before being refreshed. And those aren't outcomes that members should necessarily want to occur.