Clash of laws

This is an area which becomes very difficult to resolve, in any sort of formal manner.  In my previous complex we insisted that the Council provided individual bins for each unit, as the bylaw made each resident responsible for putting their bin out for collection and returning it afterward.  The Council were after all charging us the same amount per unit for garbage removal as a separate house in the street.  There were some residents who had difficulty through disability, but we made informal arrangements to assist them. (on a voluntary basis).

I can’t see how you can bring compulsion into this by amending the bylaw to make anyone responsible for anything other than their own rubbish.  It can become very expensive to hire some-one just to put in or take out bins, especially if they have to attend the property at additional times outside their normal roster. 

OK, so one sensible suggestion would be to enforce the standard By-Law that applies to all (NSW) Strata Plans depending upon their date of Registration, where the one for Plans Registered in 1996 states:

 Garbage disposal

An owner or occupier of a lot:

(a) must maintain within the lot, or on such part of the common property as may be authorised by the owners corporation, in clean and dry condition and adequately covered a receptacle for garbage, and

(b) must ensure that before refuse is placed in the receptacle it is securely wrapped or, in the case of tins or other containers, completely drained, and

(c) for the purpose of having the garbage collected, must place the receptacle within an area designated for that purpose by the owners corporation and at a time not more than 12 hours before the time at which garbage is normally collected, and

(d) when the garbage has been collected, must promptly return the receptacle to the lot or other area referred to in paragraph (a),

(e) must not place any thing in the receptacle of the owner or occupier of any other lot except with the permission of that owner or occupier, and

(f) must promptly remove any thing which the owner, occupier or garbage collector may have spilled from the receptacle and must take such action as may be necessary to clean the area within which that thing was spilled.

This By-Law requires residents to each “work” for their own benefit, and if they don’t comply, then the Executive Committee (E/C) could meet and determine to issue offenders with Notice to Comply with a By-Law, and whilst that could lead to Mediation that might just result in the polite and sensible solutions that you seek.

You could additionally talk to your Council’s Health Department about your issues, including about one bin/lot as the By-Law implies, and they could lean on the E/C, but be careful with this as the By-Law also places some obligations on the Owners Corporation and it would need to ensure that those were in place and fully compliant. 

I don’t know that I’d spend money on lawyers over this issue.

My understanding is that there is no provision in the Act which would allow manual labour to be demanded from owners or residents, and a By-Law requiring free manual labour could be easily challenged, perhaps as “slavery”.

However, there is nothing to stop the OC offering “fair compensation” as an incentive to volunteers.

Your problem may be that $10 per week is not “fair compensation”.

When our local council changed over from individual bins to shared bins, strata blocks were allocated only 50% of the disposal volume per lot per week that free-standing houses were given for the same annual charge, but the offset was that the garbos would come onto the property, drag the bins out to the street and back in again after emptying.

No insurance issues whatever.

That offset does allow me to calculate (from my current rates notice) the “value” that our Council assigns to bin dragging and returning.

And the answer is $3.63 per bin per collection.

Dech, why don’t you tell us how many bins your block has, how often they are emptied and then calculate an appropriate weekly value.

That price does not include washing out and sanitising bins, but that is a service which is available from commercial operators for about $6-$8 per bin per occasion (which doesn’t have to be after every emptying).

larry said …. Can a by-law really stop Meeting Notices and Minutes from being uploaded by owners to a community page?

Only if ≥75% of Owners present both personally and by proxy at the May AGM vote for it, and don’t place restrictions of the E/C’s future activities to prevent further such frivolous expenditures!

So you have about a month to rally support from all those Owners who are happy with the status quo.

I’m thinking you can’t pass a by-law that contravenes a superior law and owners are allowed to discuss issues in the Owners Corp by whatever means they like so stuff ’em.

But seriously I would be sitting down with these control freaks and asking them what it is they are worried about and then explaining that if they put this motion up, you will run a campaign in your newsletter to overturn it and they will be left with egg on their collective faces.  

You only need 25 percent of those voting to defeat their motion (which may well be illegal anyway).  And how much is this bogus attempt to censor owners costing the building?

Do they want you to moderate what’s in the newsletter – or do they want to make you a hero of free speech?  Their call.

Sovereignty may not be exactly the right word.

Or maybe it is, encompassing the concepts of copyright and business “confidential” to which a Corporation is entitled, and their legal duty to protect the personal information of their members (Owners).

Maybe the real problem is that Larry has whacked up on the public interweb every last bit of strata information he could get his hands on without permission from the OC.

Maybe, having demonstrated his ability with web sites, Larry could work with the OC to act as their webmaster, but employing at least 3 levels of access security:

1) Public

2) Residents

3) Owners

Should I really be able to find out that van BD-96-LH is owned by Mr Kypreos?

Should criminals really be able to find out that the Westbourne Tower has security issues with the foyer?

Should tenderers really be able to find out in advance how much the OC might be expecting to pay for certain work?

Anyway, the (currently) publicly available facts are:

It was agreed to accept the quote from Mueller’s to draft a bylaw to ensure the privacy of the scheme’s information and protect it from illegal re-publication – it is intended that this by-law be placed on the 2014 AGM agenda for owners to vote on.

Note: during this motion L Vincent , being the person responsible for re-publishing Owner’s Corp information on Facebook ,interrupted the meeting and argued against the necessity of this By Law.

Some discussion took place as to the importance of protecting individual Owners Information, along with Owner’s Corp information as a whole, from being made available to the millions of Facebook users who had neither right to nor any natural interest in having access to the Schemes confidential information. The Chairman put this motion to a formal vote, and the Committee unanimously voted in favour of the motion.

Anyways, off to get a haircut now.