From the Forum: Bans on unfinancial votes even tougher than you thought

We’re back! Like that never-ending turkey curry or the last few chocolates that nobody likes, there are quite a few left-overs from the festive season for us to get our teeth into.

One of them is a question that’s as basic as it gets in strata politics – who decides who is “unfinancial” and therefore can’t vote at general or committee meetings.

In NSW, any owner can call on the chair to announce who at the meeting is entitled to vote on any issue or at the election of the strata committee.

But there are some bizarre twists of which you may not be aware.  Did you know, for instance, that you can nominate someone to the committee if you are unfinancial but you can’t be nominated yourself, and you can’t even vote for the person you nominated.

Also, did you know that committee members can’t vote in a strata committee meeting if they or the person who nominated them for election is unfinancial at the start of the meeting?

Considering that most strata schemes that I’ve been in don’t even bother to check who is nominating whom, that could be a tough one to enforce.  But it’s all laid out in various bits of the strata Act, in a discussion that you will find HERE.

Elsewhere in the Forum …

• The claws are out in the discussion about what to do about the owner who insists on feeding stray cats. That’s HERE.
• Can the owners corp pass a by-law forbidding any kind of Airbnb letting, including genuine sharing when the host is still living on the premises? That’s HERE.
• What can you do when the chair waits till you’re on holiday to push through permission to allow the tree shading your window to be destroyed by lopping? That’s HERE.
• Finally, a reader in Victoria lives in a block where the developer is on the board of the strata management firm and has been selling off common property to benefit commercial operators in the building, while residents, many of whom are immigrants who don’t realise they have rights, are being ripped off. That’s HERE.

There are of course, more issues on the Flat Chat Forum – old and new and those that come around every year, like Christmas. Is there something bugging you in your block? Log in and post us a question and we will solve all your problems (conditions apply).

Happy new year!