#24976
Sir Humphrey
Strataguru


    @JimmyT
    said:
    …but it depends very much on the type of person we are talking about.

    I have seen strata committees brought to a standstill because one person is so certain that they are right that they will not allow any other views to be discussed, let alone agreed on.

    This can range from refusal to move on to the next item, even after a vote has been taken, to physically and emotionally threatening rage…

    Yep. I’ve seen that too. It took a huge effort to not be at standstill or completely off-track. The EC member was not physically threatening, and mostly genial in person, but by email a different person regularly asserting very strongly and, to some, at least at first, persuasively, that the actions of other EC members, me in particular, were at best improper and at worst illegal. It was very wearing!

     

    We got bogged down on one matter for over a year because this EC member had an odd interpretation of a provision of the Act and refused to accept diverse sources of consistent advice. 

     

    A code of conduct or standing orders adopted by by-law at your AGM would go some way to keeping recalcitrants under control – but I don’t know of a single strata scheme that has such a thing  

    Every scheme in the ACT has an EC code of conduct, whether we like it or not, because it is a feature of the ACT’s Unit Titles (Management) Act, but I don’t think it would have helped in this instance.

    The trouble was that this EC member’s behaviour was, as another owner put it to me, “the worst kind of bullying; insidious and hard-to-pin-down as obviously aggressive.”

    Every complaint about my negligence, and worse, looked superficially reasonable but was subtly misleading if you knew the details.

    Sometimes it wasn’t subtle. On a few occasions he made confident categorical assertions about facts that could be checked. He was unequivocally wrong and had clearly not checked. There was no apology. 

    After a very stressful couple of years he resigned when a project he had opposed within the EC was overwhelmingly endorsed at a general meeting. It was a great relief to suddenly be able to have relaxed open honest collegiate EC discussion and debate again without having to worry about how this member would react and who might take him seriously.