› Flat Chat Strata Forum › Strata Committees › Talk to the hand, not the committee. › Current Page
Jimmy, thanks for the reply.
1. I agree with your view that there is no law requiring the SC to read correspondence or reply to a pain of an owner. And that it is stupid to formalise this. If I were on the SC I may be inclined to disregard abusive correspondence but would never seek to silence owners and remove their right from telegraphing their views. Also as it is proposed, the SC members alone decide if correspondence received fails their test of “reasonableness”;
2. But formalising such a regulation will inject fear into the populace and will discourage correspondence, even if crucial and far from trivial;
3. You suggest that the SC be challenged in a future AGM. The SC members are in the positions for life (sitting on a small hill of proxies, replenished annually) as most residents are charmed by a couple of them and are clueless as to what is proposed. Of those owners alert to the autocracy proposed, many are very old, in poor health and are afraid to confront the SC or genuinely plan to, but forget.
My worries are as follows:
a) The by law (or “code”) will enable the SC and agent not to acknowledge ANY correspondence they receive, so in the case of say overpaid or wrongly charged levies, the owner could take forever to get her money back. After all, her email alerting the agent and Treasurer could be said “not to have been ever received”;
b) An owner (occupier) may be accused of something he has done or his tenant (if an investor) has done and his reply to the accusation need not be acknowledged and in time he may be said to have ignored the complaint etc.
I suspect that an owner in the strata has harassed one or more SC members which may be why the proposals have been ventilated. But I cannot understand how the alleged harassing correspondence was read and the SC acting upon it, as the SC has not had a properly constituted SC meeting for the three years since the current mob were elected. Presumably they talk informally amongst themselves and choose not to hold SC meetings, but that is not what is required under the Act, isn’t it?