Doing away with Common Property water and electricity

Cosmo said: One proposal raised at the AGM was to connect water and electricity to a unit. We would have to reimburse the unit ‘connected’ for usage but the strata would save the fixed costs associated with having common property water and electricity.

Apart from the fact that the above proposal would be extremely messy and be reliant upon the on-going agreement of the current and subsequent Proprietors of the Lot “connected”, the usual practice is for Water Utilities to maximise their revenue by charging those so-called “fixed costs” to the individual Proprietors of serviced Lots, and for the Owners Corporation (O/C) to be charged for the property’s water usage only.

Under this usual scenario, the O/C would recover its costs of water usage from its individual members (i.e. Proprietors) as a component of their levy contributions and as calculated from their respective units of entitlement, so unless a significant number of Lots are unoccupied or some are non-residential that’s a fairly equitable arrangement.

Personally I don’t think that the saving of those “fixed costs” could be justified by the O/C’s costs of the works involved, and furthermore whilst it can certainly recover costs (as income) I don’t think that a payment (an expense) by way of a permanent / regular reimbursement to an individual Proprietor is permissible under the Act.

Can you advise as a matter of interest, does your Water Utility itself currently read each of those supply meters that have been retrofitted to individual Lots and invoice each Proprietor individually for the recorded usage?

Assuming the OC’s only foreseeable use of electricity is for this one common property light, could it be a solar light of some sort? One modest solar panel and some cabling to link to a battery would be ample to run one good LED globe. This ‘off-grid’ arrangement would be purchased by the OC and and it would remain an OC responsibility to maintain, avoiding the need for messy arrangements with one unit owner. Sealed batteries these days require little maintenance and last for ages, especially running just one light. The key thing is that the light is presumably needed for safety and the OC cannot pass that responsibility to one unit owner. Later owners of the unit might not accept it anyway. The savings from the electricity ‘service fee’/connection cost should repay the cost of the solar installation in due course.

This reminds me of a current matter in our OC. Back in the 1990s a unit owner moved into a unit (townhouses) and was not at all keen to inherit the arrangement that they would leave an outside light on to illuminate a very dark area of path. That path led to several other units. The previous owner had been given a small compensation for the cost but the new owner was not keen and the whole arrangement eventually was forgotten. The treasurer back in the 1990s resisted extending the common property lighting and installing another light. She asserted that it would be very expensive. Decades later, the unit’s outside light was not always left on, that patch of path has remained very dark and narrow for the last two decades, an OC liability that waiting to happen, especially with several elderly people living down that path.

Now I am treasurer and I find the cost to extend the lighting circuit and add the light is trivial in the scheme of things and there was no resistance to doing it when I proposed that our updated sinking fund plan include adding a few lights for several such dark patches on paths. It seems to me that the earlier treasurer had regarded it as a virtue to avoid any spending. Now we have an electrician installing the lights and people wonder why it had not happened years ago.