Was this ‘by the book’? if only there was a book to go by. First of all, it’s not unusual from someone who wants a special resolution by-law like this to pay for both the by-law and the meeting. You are, after all, the only person benefitiing from this process.
Secondly, you have tripped over one of the great truisms of politics – never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.
It’s a shame you hadn’t come on to this forum before you launched this effort as I’m sure the one resounding message all of our regulars would have given you was “make sure you have the numbers”.
There are two things you can do before you go round again with this (as you should). Make direct contact with as many other owners as you can and ask them to support your application. Now that you know there is one person against this, you know you need three other votes to get past the 75 percent vote (assuming the one ‘no’ vote is the only one).
Many people won’t vote in favour of something even if they don’t object to it, just because they see no reason to do so. The best reason you can give them is that some day they might want community support and the best way to ensure that is to do the right thing for your neighbours when the opportunity arises.
The next thing I would do is to ask the Strata Manager to organise an EGM by proxy, if possible, so that the expense is kept to a minimum. Even if you can’t do that, you need to get a hold of half a dozen of the official proxy forms and do some serious door-knocking both to explain your plans and to get people on-side.
As far as the actual expense of holding the EGM goes, I have no idea if that’s too much, too little or right on the money. Maybe some of our strata manager readers can give us an opinion. It could be, though, that your strata manager has a standard fee written into their contract. It’s just a shame nobody explained this to you first.