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Just out of curiosity: Does NSW have the option to lodge an ‘Absentee vote’ rather than appoint a proxy?
Here in the ACT an owner can do either. Meeting papers must include a form(s) (which is approved by the EC) to enable both forms of voting.
A proxy can be appointed to vote as directed for some or all motions or as they see fit and can vote on the owner’s behalf on any procedural motion or motion to amend a motion that might come up.
On the other hand, an absentee vote can be submitted for each motion that is listed on the agenda. Obviously you can’t have an absentee vote on a procedural or amendment motions because you don’t know about them in advance.
@Lady Penelope said:
Tiger – I have owned a Lot in a very large layered strata scheme on several hectares of land in QLD, with over 170 townhouses. Our by laws required that owners submit a photo of the animal when applying for permission to keep the animal. These photos were kept on file by the on site manager. I guess this was a type of “register”.This is what we avoided (105 townhouses on 11.4Ha) by amending our rules to give automatic permission for small numbers of certain sorts of animals subject to various conditions. The EC was not interested in the bureaucracy of keeping a file of photos and playing police-man. Previous pet rules were poorly complied with anyway. If an animal becomes a nuisance, neighbours will quickly let us know whose animal it is. This leaves us only having to bother with permissions and record-keeping for rare instances of something out of the ordinary and only getting involved in actual problems.
Depends on what state/territory.
It could be that the budget pays for work but the relevant unit owners reimburse and that appears on a different line of the budget.
It could be that there is a very weird thing happening.
It could be the OC maintains all the external structures. The units with garages might have more ‘entitlements’ as a consequence of having perhaps a bigger unit and a garage and so pay more in levies.
It could be that the garage is actually common property but the individual unit owners were granted a special privilege for exclusive use. With what terms and conditions?
What parking is provided for other units?
Hi Jimmy,
I wasn’t really advocating the friendly neighbour solution for mass adoption; it is just what works for me as a stop-gap until the rest of the world catches up. If I could plug in at my unit, I could take advantage of our time of use tariff and choose to mostly charge at off-peak rates and mostly avoid peak rates except when I mean to go out again for a second longish trip soon after returning from the first.
Installing 15A outlets for ordinary, routine, ‘slow’ charging would costs a few 100s of dollars each. Serious fast charging from a three phase supply and a billing system is well into the multiple thousands. You certainly would not put multiples of these in a strata parking area. The supply to the street probably couldn’t cope. Just one would be very nice to have though it would introduce a bunch of issues. None of those are insurmountable but given a choice, I would much rather have an ordinary power point metered back to my unit that lets me charge when and as I like on whichever tariff arrangement I care to have. As an EC member, I would much rather that too – once installed it does not have an on-going need for central administration and maintenance. If something goes wrong with the dedicated fast charger, everyone with an EV will be screaming for access to an ordinary power point.
A big impediment to the uptake of EVs is shifting people’s thinking away from the dedicated ‘filling station’ model that they are so accustomed to from how things work with liquid fuel vehicles. From almost a decade of experience, I can assure anyone who cares to listen that the need for fast charging is much less than is often assumed by people who don’t drive yet EVs. Most people, most of the time, will be happy with an ordinary outlet where they normally park. However, I support councils and businesses putting in charging stations here and there, even though I predict they will not get a lot of use, because it is reassuring to people who don’t yet know that they won’t need them if they buy an EV.
So, fast charging is handy to have access to, for reassurance rather than very much actual usage. In Canberra we have had a trial running with slowish and fast chargers available for free after applying for an RFID card. Aside from trying one of the fast chargers once, just to see that it worked on the relevant inlet on my car, I have not had any reason to use it. I certainly won’t be bothering with it from now on since the local network operator, who installed the chargers, has introduced an access charge as well as a usage charge and I don’t want to pay $120/year for access to chargers that I am unlikely to need. I would much prefer a higher usage charge and free access (like a toll road or petrol station). I do buy petrol a few times a year for when I have trip out of town. I don’t have to pay an access fee to be able to fill up.
That said, a few fast chargers scattered around a city and particularly at edges on the major routes in/out of town and at intervals on highways co-located with places selling decent coffee is what is needed to enable intercity driving. Again, the model should be free access with a charge for actual consumption. Or, you get a plug-in hybrid, which can be purely electric for most of your city driving and only use any significant amount of liquid fuel when you head out of town for a longer trip.
@JimmyT said:
…One thing you can’t do is just hook your car up to a mains socket like it was a trickle battery charger. You need a professionally installed three-phase supply that is connected to the buildings power supply. …Actually a trickle charge on an ordinary socket is exactly what you do nearly always, albeit you ‘trickle’ at 10A.
Electric vehicles happen to one of my ‘things’. I have been driving fully battery electric cars for 8 years. I converted a petrol car when buying one was not an option. About 3 1/2 years ago we got a second EV, a commercial Mitsubishi iMiEV.
One thing people tend to assume is that a fancy fast charger is required, which then requires the 3-phase supply and so on. It might be handy occasionally but in practice virtually everyone finds that an ordinary 10A power point, or at most a 15A outlet, is sufficient. You really don’t want to be routinely charging on a fast charger anyway if you want longevity from your battery. Installing a fast charger for everyone would be prohibitively expensive and unnecessary. Having just one would be nice-to-have but it won’t be fast if it is the only way to charge so there is a queue to use it.
Far better to let everyone charge slowly when they want at their own parking spaces. This works fine if you don’t need the car full in a hurry, which you usually don’t. Far more often you need to have it full in the morning, which can easily be done on an ordinary power point. Sometimes you need to have had a useful top up for when you plan to go out again a little later, which can also be achieved with a couple of hours of ordinary power point charging.
There is no single, best solution for retrofitting EV charging into strata titled properties. My first choice, if it is physically practical, would be to just let everyone have an ordinary 15A socket in their parking place wired back their unit/lot’s meter.
If you have a garage already, and you have an ordinary power point already, and it goes to your personal meter, you are set. You can get an ‘EVSE’ (a special charging cable with some smarts in a box in the cable) which has a bog-standard, moulded 10A plug on one end to go into an normal powerpoint. It will comply with standards that tells the charger in the car to not take charge any faster than 10A. If you have an EVSE with a 15A plug, the box in the cable will tell the car to not take more than 15A. Most cars come with an EVSE with a 15A standard plug. Often this is being conservative as the EVSE actually only takes 10A. Anyway, a 10A or 15A single phase socket is routine, standard stuff.
It gets more complicated if you can’t simply hard-wire back to the lot/unit’s meter. Then, I would still advocate that the OC supplies a 15A outlet at each parking space with some means to sub-meter each unit’s usage. If the OC wants to also have one fast-charger as well, that would be icing on the cake. Charging a higher kWh charge for that would encourage people to only use it when they need it, which won’t be often, so it will be available for people who need their battery full rapidly.
BTW. I could not get a power point wired back from my parking space to my townhouse unit (too far). I park adjacent to a neighbour’s unit in a shared carport. I was fortunate that my neighbour and our OC approved having an ordinary 15A socket in the carport between the neighbour’s space and mine wired back to the neighbour’s meter box. We have had meter on just that outlet and I reimburse my neighbour for what I have added to his bill, a few hundred dollars every 6 months or so. This works while he continues to pay a flat electricity tariff. It would get complicated with time of use metering and so on.
If you can get the numbers to be 6:2 then you will have come very close to the ‘fewer than 25% opposed’. In the ACT that would be a pass for a special resolution since here we need fewer than a third opposed. I’d say there is a fair chance the Tribunal would ‘give effect to the failed motion’ if you have demonstrated that there is 75% approval and the two opposing cannot demonstrate any detriment from the proposal.
BTW. Do all the units have the same unit entitlements? If the two who oppose have fewer entitlements than others then their opposition could add up to less than 25% if you demand a poll vote. That is when votes are weighted according to unit entitlements.
I think there is usually a provision to keep going month to month at the last year rate till a new agreement is made.
I have a copy of our OC’s ACT agreement made a couple of years ago. If you send me a personal message I can arrange to email it to you. It does have an SCA logo in the corner so it might be standard.
There is always one! Still they are only one and should not get far overturning the democratically arrived at, considered decision of the rest of the OC.
Most places have a catch-all rule/by-law/article about not doing anything on the common property which unreasonably interferes with the reasonable use and enjoyment of the common property by other residents. If enough people think the shoe issue is serious enough that could be made to apply.
This is about the allocation of ‘unit entitlements’ (ACT-speak. Other places might use a different term). If a development had only identical units then each would get the exact same number of unit entitlements. However, if some are larger and some smaller, or some likely to cost the OC more than others for insurance or maintenance or have more occupants using the common facilities, then the number of ‘unit entitlements’ will vary. So, it would not be unusual for a large penthouse to have three times the unit entitlements of a much smaller unit.
In the ACT, and I think elsewhere, in the normal run of things, each unit’s owner would have one vote in a general meeting whether the unit is large or small. However, any unit owner has the right to demand a ‘poll vote’ for any particular motion. When that happens the votes are weighted according to unit entitlements. Then the penthouse owner’s vote would count three times as much as the vote of the owner of the smallest unit.
With larger or smaller unit entitlements comes larger or smaller levies. Each owner contributes to the owners corporations costs in proportion to their entitlements. So, while the penthouse owner can exercise a right to have a greater say in decisions, they also have to pay more due to having a greater share in the property overall. Indeed it is a bit like shares in a company. It is as if the penthouse owner bought a greater share of the overall development at the start than the owner of the smallest unit.
Some units paying more is justified to some extent because their more expensive unit is responsible for a greater proportion of the OC’s insurance bill. Where the OC provides unmetered services, it is reasonable to assume the larger units are likely in the long term to use more than the smaller units. On the other hand, some OC costs are the same per unit, regardless of the size of the unit, so perhaps unit entitlements should not be strictly proportional to size or market value of the unit.
In the set of townhouses where I live, the largest unit is quite a lot more than twice the size of the smallest unit but it has only about twice the unit entitlements. Even some identical units have slightly different unit entitlements. I think this reflects that some costs are fixed per unit while only part of the OC costs are proportional to unit size or value (notably insurance) and some identical units may have been thought to have ‘better’ locations than others on the site.
People can and do debate at length about the best and most proper or fair way to allocate unit entitlements. I don’t think there is a way that is 100% perfect but generally I do agree that the penthouse should pay somewhat more and should get a proportionately bigger share of the vote if a poll is demanded.
Generally it is the developer who decides the schedule of unit entitlements. If they are manifestly unfair the allocation can be challenged and the state or territory Tribunal can order a reassessment of the schedule. Also an OC can vote and decide to reallocate according to a new valuation of the units but it takes a high level of agreement, not just a simple majority vote. Also, a reallocation might be required by state regulation if a unit has a sufficiently major alteration requiring approval by planning authorities that the authorities will only approve with a reallocation of entitlements.
One quirk in all this could be that the penthouse might have been created out of three units after the strata plan was registered, so the penthouse owner did actually buy three units, not one. Perhaps after the plan was registered putting in two doors to join the three units was regarded as a minor variation to the construction plan? If the change of plan was before the plan and unit entitlements were registered, then the large penthouse might still have been allocated three times the entitlements of a small unit of one third the floor area. So, if the situation is the first of these, it might really be correct that the penthouse owner gets to vote three times even when a poll is not demanded and everyone is doing the usual simple one unit-one vote voting.
I hope that all makes sense!
In the ACT and likely elsewhere the tenant and the owner are held jointly and separately liable to comply with the rules (aka by-laws). So, try the land-lord as suggested.
Otherwise, its the Tribunal. My experience with the ACT Tribunal has been that it is very fair and reasonable and gives all parties time to put their case to ensure natural justice, so it takes time, but ultimately it makes a good decision.
Be sure all along to make sure the other party understands that defying a breach notice and defying Tribunal orders are both legal offences. That has not stopped one person I know dragging a matter out by non-compliance. It is worth going through the process to demonstrate to the building that you are willing to enforce the rules. Saves more grief in the long run.
Is the balcony common property? Were the air-cons installed by the developer or ad-hoc by owners at later times? Is there a rule/by-law/article that says who is responsible for their maintenance or that gave permission for the private property to be installed on common property, perhaps with conditions?
My guess is: If the air-cons were installed by the developer, yet service individual units, or were installed with permission from the OC by individual owners, then the OC should pay for relocation since that only becomes necessary as a consequence of something the OC is doing. Unless of course, there is some indemnity clause which says something about the OC not being responsible for anything to do with them – Essentially: ‘Install them on the balcony at your own risk.’ IE ‘Don’t blame the OC if we later say they have to be moved.’
Does everyone have one? Are you all in the same boat? If so, it really doesn’t matter whether the OC pays or you do. If the OC pays, then ultimately the cost has to be recouped through the OC levies. It would really only matter if a few people have them and the rest don’t.
Also, ‘7 days’ notice in practice means two weeks since you have to allow time for postage.
Here is an ACT example of a Tribunal decision on a similar subject:
https://acat.act.gov.au/decisions/bennett-v-owners-unit-plan
The OC was ordered to repair the ducted system.
Assuming similarity with the ACT strata legislation, I would expect that a decision to not maintain an aspect of common property would require a higher grade resolution of a general meeting, eg. a ‘special resolution’. In the ACT that means a majority in favour and fewer than a third opposed of those taking part in the meeting. In NSW, I believe it is fewer than a quarter opposed.
So, your OC would have the means to properly decide that it is not worthwhile to maintain the building’s ducted air-conditioning system and it might also decide on some more practical alternative(s) (eg. better insulation, shading of the foyer windows, ventilation, a newer, cheaper-to-run stand-alone air-con system for the foyer and/or efficient lighting to add less heat load). It is not a decision the strata committee can make on its own. However, the committee should develop a proposal/recommendation and present that to a general meeting.