@John Kaunitz said:
WhaleWe need to untangle the logic of what you saying because I don’t disagree with the concerns you start with. Yes you can have problems with contractors and yes not all strata committees are competent.
However, none of this requires a special resolution requirement to address and having a special resolution passed per se will not protect the owners corporation. It will just make an everyday process to approve routine and essential renovations more difficult.
The pages on Flat Chat are full of tales of people who have had work approved on a nod and a wink – and then their successors as owners and committees are left to carry the can. If you don’t have a system that has some legal authority behind it, it will be exploited, ignored and abused.
In particular, at present, strata committees can set any condition they like in approving a renovation.
No they can’t. Only owners corporations can set conditions in by-laws and you can’t create a by-law that supersedes an existing or superior law.
It has been suggested that the owners corporation could require that their own contractor install the waterproofing. This is not unreasonable since the waterproofing is common property – the property of the owners corporation.
This is news to me. Owners Corps can only insist on specific contractors if there is no alternative that could feasibly do the job properly.
As the law now stands, if owners don’t trust their strata committee they can nominate bathroom renovations as something the strata committee cannot approve. This is a standard motion at every AGM that specifies matters the strata committee cannot deal with.
The AGM – where this motion would be presented – is also where the owners choose their committees. If they don’t trust them, why would they elect them?
The new legislation forces all schemes to approve such routine matters by a special resolution which is a huge impost on all owners, including those in schemes which have dealt with this issue in an effective, professional and trouble free manner for years .
You mean, permission has been granted without any requirement on the part of the owner to take responsibility for the work done and the effect it has on common property, through the instrument of a special resolution by-law? Effective and trouble-free are subjective assessments. Professional? I don’t think so.
It is also a fundamental misuse of the special resolution concept.
In your opinion …
My reading of strata law is that the extraordinary powers of special resolutions are intended to deal with constitutional changes to the strata scheme such as changing common property (as it is defined) or implementing new by-laws. A special resolution is also the mechanism under the new legislation to gain approval for the ultimate constitutional change, namely to wind up the scheme.
Your reading is specious and fundamentally wrong. Special resolutions are designed to allow people to make changes to their own lots and affected common property while accepting responsibility for the ongoing maintenance of the work. Why else would the Act say that in the absence of agreement of who is responsible, that falls back on the owners corp. It’s all about making people responsible for their actions, either as owners or as members of the Owners Corporation.
The requirement to apply the same level of approval to bathroom renovations that every owner could expect to get approval for in a reasonably straightforward manner, is bizarre and absurd to say the least.
It really isn’t. It’s about compelling people to accept they have responsibilities as members of a community. That community will decide how stringent they wan their conditions to be.
The red tape generated is likely to benefit strata lawyers or strata managers who will deal with the resulting legalities but is certainly contrary to the originally stated objective of the strata law review which led to the new legislation.
And the originally stated objective was …?