@bluehouse said:
Sir Humphrey, What you describe sounds logical, but our committee doesn’t have authority to approve an alteration that requires a special by-law. And don’t have authority to approve on behalf of the Owners Corp.We have had trouble in the past with the committee approving something that we already had a general bylaw covering, on condition the requirements of the bylaw were met. The owner went ahead and built the addition and when the requirements weren’t met it became very difficult to deal with the situation and impossible to rectify without asking the owner to remove the addition (which the committee were unwilling to do).
As you say, the committee doesn’t have the power to approve or otherwise but it does have considerable influence and it could set the parameters that would have to be met before the proposal went to a general meeting with its support.
Making the support provisional on certain conditions could work if one of those conditions was that the owner agreed that failure to do the work agreed in the conditions would lead to the common property being restored and the new construction removed at the owner’s expense.
Of course, if the committee doesn’t have the stomach for anything so confronting then they should step back and require the owner to take whatever laborious steps are required to get this done through the normal processes.
Don’t forget, the owner is interested in only one thing – getting what they want as quickly and economically as possible.
The committee has to be interested primarily in what’s best for the whole building, now and in the future, not just one owner. They should not allow themselves to be railroaded by one person.