@Billen Ben said::
The Chair is running the meeting and the Chair puts motions to the meeting so if you vacate the Chair, via a motion, then you have no Chair and therefore nobody is running the meeting, that makes anything that follows open to challenge because do you even have a meeting?
This is the kind of tedious nitpicking that drives people away from Executive Committees. This what section 8 of Schedule 3 of the act says.
8 Chairperson to preside at meetings
(1) The chairperson presides at all meetings of the executive committee at which the chairperson is present and, if absent from any such meeting, the members of the executive committee present at that meeting must appoint one of their number to preside at that meeting during the absence of the chairperson.
It’s not rocket surgery. The chairman is absent (because he hasn’t been elected yet) and the obvious choice to run the meeting until the new chair is elected is the secretary although it could be anybody the meeting chooses. Not even the geniuses at CTTT would uphold a claim that the chairman wasn’t properly elected because there wasn’t a nomination in the motion of vacation of the chair.
It may not be technically perfect but it gets the job done and, politically, means you don’t have to show your hand too soon. It also means you can avoid making this a battle between two personalities rather than an effort by the other members of the EC to make the committee more democratic.
You can quote all the legal textbooks you like but here in the real world people get stuff done and if they are not exactly legally compliant at any given time, they are not alone in strata in NSW. You do what you need to get what you want.
Horseley is mostly about business meetings and, in any case, unless it has been adopted as that strata’s meetings bible, it has no standing. Ilkin, though a seminal writer on strata law and an invaluable source for many years, is a lawyer – he’ll tell you the right way which is not always the best way.
I’ve seen this done exactly as I described and it worked. Tell me a case where what I have described has been successfully challenged in court and I will retract and apologise – but start another thread to do it. There’s an important and very real issue being discussed here and I don’t want it bogged down in legalistic textbook BS that, at the end of the day, makes little or no difference.
If it makes you happy, I’ll repeat my second suggestion that there should be two motions, one to vacate the chair, another to elect a new chairperson. That’s it. Take the legal debate elsewhere if you want to keep going with it.