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Topic
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The Strata Act says that the secretary must call an extraorinary general meeting “as soon as practicable” after receiving a requisition.
Is there any more proscribed process? For example, must the Secretary (or SM or EC) acknowledge the receipt of the requisition within a certain time frame, notice the meeting with a time frame, and hold the meeting within a timeframe?
Otherwise, couldn’t the requisition be postponed indefinately?
Thanks
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@basjan27 said:
Is there any more prescribed process? For example, must the Secretary (or SM or EC) acknowledge the receipt of the requisition within a certain time frame, notice the meeting with a time frame, and hold the meeting within a timeframe?
Otherwise, couldn’t the requisition be postponed indefinitely?
The answers are no, no ,no and no. And yes.
There is nothing more than the ‘practicable’ ruling but then any EC that deliberately delays a meeting where there performance is going to come under scrutiny, and doesn’t provide a valid reason for doing so, is merely giving ammunition to their opponents.
And there are valid reasons – like the chair being on holiday or the usual venue not being available but there is a limit and they’d be foolish to stretch that too far.
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@basjan27 said:
…we’re worried the majority on the EC will delay a requisitioned EGM until after they sign off very expensive piece of work, which the majority of OC want to stop…Why would the EC want to rush into a bit of expensive work? I only comment because last year the above quote could have come from one of our owners while I was on an EC that wanted to do some urgent work without waiting for a general meeting.
In our case we would have waited till an AGM to approve a budget in the usual manner except that the work was an urgent repair that we believed the OC was responsible for which if not performed immediately had potential to kill someone. As it happened, moving as briskly as we could, by the time work could start, the AGM rolled around anyway. The person who was outraged about the work lobbied dug up some astonishingly poor advice from a former managing agent who had advised her as part of an earlier EC to ignore the early signs of the problem years earlier. She did have my sympathy in as much as the earlier committee was acting on advice that they should have been able to rely on. Nonetheless, rather than listening to a new view she muddied the waters so much for the rest of the owners that we needed heavy duty, formal legal advice to clarify what had been obvious to the more recent EC about our responsibilities. In the end the AGM was convinced by the recent EC and only that earlier EC member and one other in the room voted against proceeding with the works.
Maybe this isn’t your situation, but sometimes an EC just has to go ahead regardless and work out who pays later. Teys Lawyers put this well in a training note: “Managing the risk of failing to repair and maintain common property”
There is another way around it which is probably easier. The EC has to have a meeting and make a decision to proceed with the work. To have an EC meeting they are obliged to give notice of the meeting to all owners and include the proposal in the agenda.
Schedule 3 of the Strata Schemes Management Act (refer below, para 2) provides that if owners holding 1/3 of the aggregate unit entitlements give notice in writing to the secretary of the EC that they object to the making of a specific decision then that decision has no force or effect.
Assuming that you have at least 1/3 of the aggregate unit entitlements then you can serve notice to that effect. Note that if they don’t give proper notice of the meeting with an agenda etc., then you could probably challenge the decision on those grounds anyway.
If you are concerned in relation to the admin fund and financial management generally you may want to consider putting up a motion at your next AGM limiting the decisions that the EC can make, i.e. to a certain amount of money.
11 Decisions of executive committee
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(2) A decision of an executive committee has no force or effect if, before that decision is made, notice in writing is given to the secretary of the executive committee by one or more owners, the sum of whose unit entitlements exceeds one-third of the aggregate unit entitlement, that the making of the decision is opposed by those owners.
@scotlandx said:
There is another way around it which is probably easier. The EC has to have a meeting….. To have an EC meeting they are obliged to give notice of the meeting to all owners and include the proposal in the agenda.….. Note that if they don’t give proper notice of the meeting with an agenda etc., then you could probably challenge the decision on those grounds anyway….
.Every month there is another EC meeting in my SP without a detailed agenda. Meetings which generate EC minutes that have resolutions that are mostly from, if not all from, introduced matter.
I read posts that say the EC is supposed to send a detailed agenda, stick to the agenda etc etc and i think what a load of rubbish because in my SP they do not and CTTT did nothing when the matter went to them. I sent the CTTT fools 3 years of EC minutes that showed the agendas are not detailed, not followed and that the EC has little regard for meeting procedures; waste of time.
Here is an example from my next EC meeting agenda;
“discuss quote”
What on earth does that mean, what quote, for what work or purchase??
This is typical of what CTTT have “endorsed” for being a detailed agenda item, two vague words.
The EC are not obliged to give anything because if they were obliged to then my EC would have been made to meet the obligation.
I am not questioning the validity of what scotlandx says because it is correct but you might well find that next to nobody cares if the EC do not follow process because theory and reality are sometimes worlds apart when CTTT are involved.
@basjan27 said:
A follow-up question:Once the requisition agenda has been sent to the Sectrerary can the motions included in the requsition be changed, or new ones added, by a member of the OC or by the EC?
Can the EC, having received the requisition, then decide to add motions of its own for consideration at the EGM.
Or, must the agenda be presented as is at the EGM?
Thanks
Can the motions be changed?
Yes; the motions can be changed on the day (at the meeting) by a motion to allow the motion to be amended but the motion cannot be amended to the point it becomes what could be considered a new motion.
A motion to amend the motion is put to the meeting and the meeting discusses the proposed amendment and then votes to accept or decline the amendment. If accepted the amended motion is then put to the meeting and voted on, if the proposed amendment fails then the original motion is voted on in its original form.
Can the EC add to the agenda?
The EC*, as a collective, cannot add to the agenda because the EC are not a person BUT any person can add to the agenda (provided they will be eligible to vote at the meeting) as long as the addition is made prior to the EC sending the notices for the meeting.
* In Qld the Act specifically states the EC can submit motions but in NSW the Act is clear who can submit motions and “the EC” does not qualify. If the EC was allowed to submit motions in NSW then non financial owners who are EC members and people not on the strata roll (both fairly common EC members in some SPs) could have an avenue to submit motions and if that is going to be the case then the Act might as well say any old Joe can submit a motion, no restrictions.
If you are a clear majority and you are a small enough group to be able to readily communicate with each other I think you could issue a notice of a general meeting yourselves. You would need to have contact details for all owners to issue the notice. If you make sure that you do everything by the book I can’t see who could restrain an owners corporation from meeting.
We (our EC) recently called a meeting in the more usual manner to put a series of motions on an urgent and necessary matter and one extra matter that was not strictly necessary but a majority wanted to do it and it had to be done now if we were going to. An owners who has long campaigned against the second of those and refused to accept our legal advice on the first of those went to ACAT (the ACT Tribunal) seeking orders to declare each of the motions invalid and for orders to cancel the meeting.
The ACAT called an urgent hearing two days before our scheduled meeting date. This sort of behaviour has gone beyond a joke. We did not want to put up with this sort of sabotage and we engaged a lawyer to represent the owners corporation, the same lawyer who had assisted us in drawing up the necessary motions for the meeting. The meeting proceeded and the lawyer tweeted afterwards: “Just won a tribunal hearing in ACT so a meeting an (sic) proceed this week – courts don’t like restraining meetings – it’s jumping the gun”
So, if you tried before the conventional route to call a meeting and now a majority of owners put their names to a meeting notice, I doubt you could be be in trouble and I expect the decisions of the meeting would be valid if proper notice was given to all owners and proper minutes taken and distributed in the correct time frame and so on.
If you can afford proper legal advice though it would be worth it.
No it isn’t. If you put a resolution up for inclusion in the agenda it has to be included without alteration. If they want their own resolution they have to put it up separately.
You can move an amendment to a resolution at the actual meeting but it can’t change the substance of the resolution.