As if giving up your evenings and the occasional weekend wasn’t bad enough, strata committee members – usually the chair or secretary – sometimes have to put up with horrendous abuse from owners.
Now, sometimes some criticism is justified, but verbal abuse, harassment and threats never are.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the time the people who are angry simple don’t understand how strata works and they feel like they are being persecuted. It doesn’t help if the committee member isn’t 100 percent au fait with legislation or even the scheme’s bylaws either.
When two people in conflict simply can’t see each other’s points of view, it can get personal and once it becomes personal, it can get out of hand.
We have a post this week from a Flatchatter who writes that the secretary in their building is getting threatening emails from an owner and asks what can be done about it without escalating the problem.
Now, the post doesn’t detail the nature of the threats but if it’s a case of the disgruntled owner threatening to stand against the person at the next AGM election, or even tell other owners why they are unhappy, that’s part of the cut and thrust of politics at this fourth tier of government.
However, if the threats are to harm the secretary’s reputation, their business or even hurt them physically, then that’s a whole other matter. If that is accompanied by repeated verbal abuse – in phone calls, emails or, say, defamatory signs on the scheme’s noticeboard – that’s a different matter and the secretary may be able to apply to a local court or the police in NSW for an Apprehended Personal Violence Order.
In Victoria you can apply for a Personal Safety Intervention Order and in Queensland it would be a non-domestic protection notice but the law there seems to be very much focussed on domestic violence, so you should talk to a lawyer.
The conditions under which these orders would be issued vary from state to state so it would be well worth talking to police or the clerk of your local court to see if your circumstances merit an order being issued.
Getting back to the original post, how can you deal with this without escalating it. The only way to do that is to sit down with the disgruntled owner and find out why they are so unhappy, But if that doesn’t work, mediation through Fair Trading may provide an answer before you get the courts and police involved. You can have your say HERE.
Elsewhere in the Forum
- Resident is detailing cars commercially on common property. That’s HERE.
- Is it possible to have secret ballots for issues and elections at the AGM? That’s HERE.
- The contract for building work in our scheme only refers to “houses”. Is there a standard build contract specifically for work on a strata scheme? That’s HERE.
- Committee says I have to pay for my own engineers to establish cause of water ingress from common property. That’s HERE.
- How should I go about getting bike racks installed for everyone in the block? That’s HERE.
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