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Not really sure but questions that occur to me: Were non-EC members aware of the impending expense? Was it anticipated in the sinking fund plan? Did you see a copy of the sinking fund plan before purchase? Was there correspondence about the expense (Eg. quotes for repairs) on the OC records that a thorough conveyancing lawyer might have been found?
When a few of our owners were being so unpleasant to EC members that there was a risk that nobody would want stand to be elected to our executive committee, I asked our managing agent what would happen. She said that in the absence of an elected EC, the entire OC becomes the EC. She said she would continue to manage the property and that every time she needed a decision from the EC on some matter, she would be obliged to call a general meeting to make the decision. She would charge a fee for each of these extra meetings. She predicted that owners would soon get sick of that and some would put their hands up to be elected to a committee.
Your assessment seems reasonable to me. On the face of it, a defect of the common property and delay in repairing it caused damage to your property. I suggest pushing to be given reasons why an insurance claim was rejected. If it was to do with the OC’s delay taking action, that is good for you.
If that does not shed any light, I think an ACAT application could be a reasonable course of action. The Tribunal is set up to be user-friendly and inexpensive. Parties are generally self-represented and costs are generally not awarded. An initial ‘directions hearing’ will be a mediated conversation between parties to hear what each side’s position is. At that point the Tribunal will try to steer the parties to a mutually agreed settlement or might send you away to discuss further or gather further information. The Tribunal member will not tell you what you should do and will avoid expressing an opinion on whether any proposal is reasonable or not. If you do agree to some settlement, that will be made ‘a consent order’ and both parties are then obliged to stick with and carry out whatever was agreed. If you can’t agree, then the matter may be listed for a hearing.
Your application should be clear about what you want the orders to be an include evidence such as a quote for the cost of repairs and a time-line of dates such as when the leak was first noticed, when you first notified the OC, what responses you got etc.
It would be worth reading through previous ACAT Unit Titles decisions and finding one that is similar to your circumstances. Then you can refer to the previous reasoning. Look here http://web.ocnact.org.au/decisions-by-acat-test and here https://www.acat.act.gov.au
A hearing will be more formal and at the end you will be given orders according to the views of the Tribunal member, which might not please either party.
Having been to the Tribunal several times now representing our OC, it is not as scary as it first seemed and the Tribunal members have generally been impressively patient and fair.
I agree with JT. The key is the plan. You should have a plan that anticipates various irregular, possibly large, maintenance costs plus, ideally, a contingency margin, and matches that with regular, even, annual payments. The point is fairness. Everyone who is an owner in any year contributes a manageable amount that stays about the same to cover the inevitable occasional large expense.
Talk to your neighbours? If enough are concerned like you, then there are ways and means.
Sometimes it is reasonable to allow certain things to be on outside walls. However, in this case, it sounds like a problem we have where I live. Various barnacles like gas water heaters and air-con compressors get put on the outside where everyone else has to look at them and not on the inside where the unit owner would have to look at them.
Typically this happens for several reasons.
1) The unit owner is selfish and prefers to have them out of sight except to everyone else. If it went inside, it would occupy some space that the owner would prefer to use for something else. It might require a slight rearrangement of the garden furniture, for example.
2) The unit owner might be a bit more sensitive but won’t stand up to an installer who says ‘We always put them on the outside wall.’ Usually that is because the installation is much easier and slightly cheaper, but it could have gone inside the unit area if the owner had stood up to the tradie.
3) The unit owner is acting in haste because they have no hot water and just do what the tradie says. Often the tradie will tell them that they don’t need permission. Of course the tradie wants to get on with the job so they are hardly motivated to explain the operation of the relevant strata act.
4) The unit owner looks around and sees another example of a barnacle on the outside and makes the self-serving assumption that the other installation must have been approved, or, if not, nobody has done anything about it so, obviously, you can get away with it.
5) It doesn’t occur to them that they need to ask permission from anyone and, if they do need to ask, then they find that an offensive affront to their views on civil liberties etc.
Does the plan have any documentation to justify the cost projections? It should have a schedule showing the years in which certain expenses are expected to happen and some reason for the magnitude of that expense. So, for example, some bit of equipment might need a round of routine maintenance every 5 years and the cost of that is probably known from the most recent time it was done. Reasonable assumptions about inflation can be made.
A decade or so ago we had no end of trouble because a managing agent said at an AGM and it was put in the minutes that we might need $100,000 in each of the next 5 years. It didn’t happen. It was nonsense but the consequence is that we still have people anxious about our sinking fund even though our 2015-25 plan is very well documented (even if this ex-treasurer says so himself). Our biggest non-routine expense is $30K likely once every few decades and we don’t have many of the expenses that other owners corporations do have.
@Faraway girl said:
…we now intend to put the new consolidated By Laws to a general meeting called for the purpose and before we can put the motion to adopt the new By Laws, we need to rescind the registered ones…I think you could do the lot in one motion. Eg. ‘That the following set of consolidated by laws be adopted to replace all previous by laws of the strata scheme…’
New ones adopted and the old ones rescinded in one go.
Alternatively, you can adopt and rescind and amend one by one, though it can then be more complicated getting the resultant, current set registered.
Where I live, there are bits of common property that nobody but the owners of the adjacent unit is ever likely to use or want to use. We have a written policy from decades ago that unit owners are encouraged to look after the plants in these areas and blend the planting and landscaping of these areas into their own area so as to avoid the appearance of hard boundaries. Unit owners are not permitted to erect a fence that would prevent access to these area. Fences are not encouraged but they are permitted. If you want a fence it must be not extend beyond the actual unit area boundary. This arrangement has worked pretty well.
Any reader in the ACT, check s.23 of the Unit Titles (Management) Act. Subject to a set of conditions in that section, the OC can do all that is required to install sustainability infrastructure on the common property with one ordinary resolution. Also, the Act now makes it clear that the Sinking Fund Plan can anticipate expenditure on infrastructure improvements, not just strictly maintenance.
We used this section to install a PV systems a few years ago. It is working just fine, as expected.
Explain the situation to the secretary or chair of your committee if you are getting no satisfaction from the manager?
The ACT strata legislation includes a code of conduct for committee members as one of the schedules at the end of the Act http://www.legislation.act.gov.au/a/2011-41/. While it is not applicable in the NSW, it puts into words the sorts of principles that you would expect anywhere. Might be helpful.
“Is it time we certified committee members?” Well, you’d have to be crazy… and there are certainly one or two I’d like to have certified.
But seriously, I think it is great that courses and self-education materials are available but they should not be compulsory. Most of the committee members I have served with did a fine job without formal training and diligently sought good advice or read more carefully when they had the good sense to know they needed to know more about something.
@Mr Strata said:
Hi Guys, shouldn’t we stay focused on the questions at hand as to objections as to the contents of the minutes and the autocratic nature of how the commitee is functioning.A simple letter to the Secretary and Strata Manager would normally assist with this as it is then on the record of the Owners Corporation.
However if you object to a decision that the committee has made, you need 1/3rd of owners to object to the decision or 1/4 of UEs to call a general meeting
It is still not clear what the objection to the minutes is or how the EC is being autocratic. Was Bim present at the meeting? Is Bim one of the EC members? Does Bim think the minutes inaccurately record the meeting? Is Bim involved in a dispute and the minutes don’t (in Bim’s opinion) record his/her side of the story in all its detail? Does Bim object that the minutes, while accurate enough, are just embarrassing and need not have spelled out the details?
In any case, a letter setting out the objections seems like good advice.
Yep. We are preparing a community garden proposal for this year’s AGM, mindful of all the objections we heard 7 years ago when we tried something similar.
Our two biggest success for getting people mingling has been 1) having children’s playgrounds with adult seating adjacent, and 2) over the past few years, adding a generously paved area where we previously had just a basic wood BBQ and a dusty patch of worn grass, adding two large picnic tables where previously we had one small one, adding a pizza oven which is much more of a novelty than the BBQ, adding a picnic shelter roof over the oven and about half of the paved area. Now we can organise events without worrying about a risk of rain and there is a choice of shade or sun when using the BBQ, supervising kids at the adjacent playground or cooking pizza.
It helps that our site is self-sufficient for wood for the BBQ and oven.