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There are certainly competing interests (bloc of commercial owners vs domestic residents) and a failure to meet appropriate standards of governance (which surely demand that insurance be arranged through a competitive quote-seeking system). Your managing agent’s dismissive attitude towards spending $8K is unacceptable. This appears to be a case for referral to NCAT or equivalent.
How soon is your AGM? You should start making preparations for getting some new blood on the SC, with a view to lighting the proverbial fire under your seemingly inert Strata Manager. New signs may not be enough, and you could look into lockable collapsible barriers as a longer-term solution.
If replacing your antenna lead doesn’t fix it, then it is somewhere ‘upstream’. Have others had the same problem? If yes, then unlikely to be your set or its antenna lead. How extensive is your building’s cabling? There may be problems with the junction points or intermediate amplifiers. (In our building, failure of the power point serving an amplifier blacked most or all of us out; replacement fixed the problem.) There are many other possibilities, and you will have to go through a systematic process of elimination.
I agree with JimmyT ” that it’s hard enough to get unqualified people to stand for committees, without expecting them to turn up at evening classes and get a piece of paper with their name inscribed on it.” My ‘person specification’ for a new SC member in our small-medium (<40 units) strata is ‘young to middle-aged committed owner occupier with a background in business or a profession’. Unfortunately most of the people who meet that standard are committed to building careers and their relationships, and are difficult to persuade. When you omit the absent investors, the pool of available talent tends to become rather shallow. I probably just squeaked into my specification when I joined over 15 years ago as a strata neophyte, but I did come from a background of compliance-related work in senior management and had the benefit of learning on the job from experienced predecessors and strata managers. I think that I can claim that my experience compensates to some extent for my now-advanced age. Our current committee does benefit from blending long-standing owner-occupiers with some promisingly keen and well-qualified newcomers. If anyone seems rusted-on, it is because they are committed and there are no willing replacements in sight.
I agree the project is ambitious, but it may be more manageable if the individual tasks are re-shuffled and re-sequenced into two broad streams, thus:
A:
– the consultation process
– thorough review of by-laws
– modernise the by-laws, which could start with the current model by-laws (in accordance with consultation with owners re issues and challenges)
– The updated by-laws could incorporate the proposed style guide for colours and materials. Good luck with this one — there may be a wide diversity of strongly-held views among your fellow owners.
B:
– updating the plan
– common property audit and asset register
– develop a long term asset management strategy (informed by asset condition audit and assessment of options for major building component replacement). This last component should ensure compliance with the requirement for review of adequacy of the capital works fund.
A and B could proceed in parallel. A could potentially be accomplished in-house, dependent on the skill mix among Committee members. B is the more likely to require outside help.I like to think of by-laws as a guide to how things should be done to facilitate living in a community rather than a collection of ‘don’t’s. The model by-laws do no cover the car parking issues described in earlier posts. Accepted standards of civilised behaviour should stop offenders, but clearly there are people who do not live according to these standards.
In my submission to the review of NSW strata legislation, I suggested “Something that cannot be legislated in detail, but would be desirable in some sort of preamble to the Act, is an expectation that occupants observe not just the letter of their Scheme’s By-laws, but also the spirit of those that are (or should be) intended to facilitate living at close quarters and sharing facilities.” I appreciate that “spirit of the by-laws” is subjective and open to discussion.
It would be good if a draft by-law could be devised starting with a positive statement that allocated parking spaces are intended for parking of standard passenger vehicles and that storage of other items must be limited and subsidiary to the prime purpose. The dimensions of the spaces provide for doors to be opened and for people to have access to their vehicles, and it is unacceptable for vehicles to be parked in a way that will compromise this use of the spaces.
Most civilised people will acknowledge this and behave accordingly, but unfortunately there will always be exceptions who will behave as they please in the absence of a by-law explicitly prohibiting what they are doing.
I don’t have a ready solution, and perhaps there will never be one that works in all cases, but I hope this may start a discussion.
I know what it is like to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness. At least our place has so far been spared wine bottles free-falling nine floors down the chute, but that is about all! White goods and mattresses are deposited on the footpath outside only a week or two after the well-publicised council cleanup days, and the same happens with VHS players, printers, TVs and monitors (early generation flat screens as well as the stragglers of analogue-only CRT sets) a similarly brief interval after the equally well-publicised e-waste collections. Some of the latter goods will have been placed there by local residents, but I suspect that other items will have been transported from the perpetrators’ home addresses in the same capacious 4WDs that could have taken them to the e-waste collecting points!
Slobs happen.
Since fractions are to be rounded down, not up, the effective limit of one per lot applies in schemes of up to 39 lots.
“You don’t own your view” is most frequently and emphatically pointed out by those who plan to block it — most likely with a taller development — and exploit what they have turned into “their” view for their own enjoyment or onselling at a handsome profit.
In this situation, as in so many not confined to the world of strata, the law is most concerned about protecting offenders from their victims.
Perhaps this has been covered, but schemes of >20 but <40 lots seem to be in a grey area.
“(a) if the strata scheme has 20 lots or less, one,” is clear enough.
“(b) if the strata scheme has more than 20 lots, a number that is equal to not more than 5% of the total number of lots.” conveys that, in a scheme of up to 39 lots, the limit remains one.
I am in a block of 35. I am certainly not looking to be an empire-builder, and I don’t think any of my SC colleagues are either, but only a small minority of absentee owners typically turn up to general meetings, giving their proxies to ‘the chairman’. If they don’t know any other owners, and most of them don’t seem to, they could be disenfranchised if the chairman (or any other owner known to them and ready to be nominated) is limited to holding one proxy. Even rounding the permitted number up from 1.75 to 2 could still leave things a bit tight.
Basic courtesy on the part of the owner and his agent would have led to the strata administration being advised and notice given so that people would have been aware of the presence of the drone and been able to avoid being on view in a state of undress or in other embarrassing circumstances. We are fortunate not to have something like the provisions of the U S Constitution allowing guns to be on hand for the drone to be used as target practice.
This is an area where the statute law has to catch up with technology, with a body of case law to evolve over time.
Having said that, I can see some worthwhile applications of drones. Apart from still and video photography from angles hitherto unavailable, there is also scope for inspection of upper levels of the building without a need for scaffolding or the services of abseilers. The cost would be much less than that of a piloted helicopter (which would not be able to get nearly as close), and some residents may even appreciate the opportunity of purchasing some of the pictures for their own interest.
Can we take a step back? Subject to variations in individual schemes, it is not a case of “you need permission to instal a wooden floor”.
The NSW standard by-laws state:
“An owner of a lot must ensure that all floor space within the lot is covered or
otherwise treated to an extent sufficient to prevent the transmission from the floor space of noise likely to disturb the peaceful enjoyment of the owner or occupier of another lot.”I think this would apply irrespective of whether the Owners Corporation gave you permission. If I were on a Strata Committee that received the sort of request that Clau2077 proposes, I would say that we could neither give nor withhold such permission. The crucial test is not the readings on acoustic testing and the claims for the underlay provided by the floorboard marketers but, rather, the likely impact on neighbours (mainly, but not inevitably, on the floor below).
Readings in a lab setting do not necessarily predict the impact of footfall on a light sleeper below at 3 a m. Lawyers may have a good — and lucrative — time arguing about the significance of “likely” in this context.
Some simple maths and an assumption —
Three storey block suggests six to 12 owners, depending on apartment size.
Three to five may be on the Committee offering the three alternative colours.
Three, and possibly a fourth, colours will be presented to the Owners as a group.
Unless one of them is overwhelmingly preferred, voting may be fragmented and no-one will be happy.
I’m glad I live in a building with an unpainted brick and pebblecrete exterior!
On the choice of painter, be mindful of the “pay peanuts, get monkeys” principle.
I am on the Executive (or Strata Committee) of a medium sized pre-1996 scheme. Our current by-laws are essentially the Model By-laws of the 1996 Act, with some amendments to recognise current waste collection practices and allow washing to be hung on balconies. To me, the new regulations provide an opportunity to modernise, and I presume there will be scope for a scheme like ours to adopt the by-laws proposed for post-1996 schemes.In particular, I will argue for the adoption of Option A of the new By-law 5 (pets), although I hope that there will be provision for a problem animal (e g a noisy or aggressive dog that is not properly restrained by its doting owner) to be forced out. Our building has accepted one dog after its owner argued the case in terms that would have made any refusal “unreasonable”, and the dog has not put a foot wrong since its arrival. We have been informally aware of various cats, and I hope that the requirement for notification can allow for ‘grandfathering’ of existing animals once the by-law is adopted.The new By-law 9 about smoking is welcome, and I will propose Option A. I do hope that the definition of smoking can be ruled to take in the emerging vogue of ‘vaping’ e-cigarettes.By-law 14, allowing washing to be hung on balconies but not over railings, is a welcome blow for commonsense. Whatever your views on the contribution of power generation to climate change, the reality is that dryers are expensive things to run.By-law 15 will not apply to us, and presumably this can be stated in the set of by-laws that we adopt. By-law 16 is a welcome recognition of reality in all but the smallest blocks.Let the discussion begin!