[Stratademocrats]

Thanks Sir Humphrey ,

A nice simple solution…

[Stratademocrats]

Hi Flame Tree,

We don’t have any motions that we want to be voted on.

We merely want to ask questions of certain SC members to elicit information that most of the community are unaware of. We did ask a question at last year’s AGM and were told that the SC member didn’t have the information at the moment.

[Stratademocrats]

Hi Puddn,

We finally received the emailed agenda with the minutes.

Profuse apologies from the SM about clerical errors ….and “it won’t happen again”.

Maybe they had seen our Flat Chat post…?

As for being the least favourite person in the community….. well clearly, someone has to have that role.  🙂

[Stratademocrats]

Hi Lady Penelope,

I don’t think there is a lack of clarity about how we want to get the agenda for SC meetings. We have emailed the SM and rung and had meetings with them..

The AGM agenda is well presented and circulated – no problems.

It is the monthly SC meetings. Over the last nine meetings we have noted that in 4 instances there was an agenda circulated and in 5 instances there was not.

We’ve had mediation and a meeting on governance.

We engaged a lawyer to represent us against the SC and in that instance your advice was enormously helpful. One of the issues raised during mediation was governance, including, specifically, failings in relation to notice of SC meeting agendas. We thought there had been an improvement after the mediation process but unfortunately the situation seems to be reverting to the bad old days.

So, our expectations should not be a surprise to the SC or SM.

[Stratademocrats]

Thanks for all of the input on this issue. Our concern is with a lack of agendas, rather than minutes. After about 12 months of written complaints the SM seems to have accepted that minutes do need to be sent within 7 days of the SC meetings.

However, their approach to distributing the agenda before SC meetings is haphazard. As the agenda and meeting papers are emailed to the SC before the meeting, it would seem simple enough to email the same to the community. We have had that happen a few times and it was wonderful to feel “included”.

We don’t expect that we should have to go through each decision and see if we want to challenge it because it was a “big decision” and we hadn’t had an agenda. Rather, we feel it is our right to know what is going to be discussed and voted on each month, before the event.

We have a SC with 9 members in a community of 32 units.

[Stratademocrats]

Thanks, Lady P, that is very helpful.

Just a point of clarification. There is nothing on the plan for our Lot that indicates the presence of a NSW Fire Brigade egress path or any other kind of path. That issue has been raised after the event of our objection to the garden committee chairman trimming the tree over-hanging our EU area.

[Stratademocrats]

We sent your advice that proxies don’t count at an SC Meeting to both the Chairman and the Strata Manager.

The Chairman deferred to the Strata Manager who responded :

“I don’t understand what the issue is here? There were 4 members present in person and 2 members gave proxies. That’s 6/9 present. As long as the proxies were provided before the meeting the timing is irrelevant, and if the meeting was invalid we wouldn’t have allowed it to occur.”

Can you tell us where in the SMA or regulations it states that proxies are not valid?

The minutes were sent to the committee members on 3 March for the 8 March meeting.

On 7 March the strata management company advised that they didn’t have our letter of complaint. So we assume that the two members who signed proxies had no idea of the content of our complaint.

[Author]

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