Executive Committee Meetings

Hi Willie,
Jimmy reports to the Flat chatter a new resource available via the Strata Community Australia (SCA) website (formerly the Institute of Strata Title Managers).
It is a free training course for people involved inthe managment of their OC.

The following relates to ECs;
As representatives of the Owners Corporation an Executive
Committee’s forum for decision making is at a duly convened meeting. Due notice must be given in accordance with the provisions of the SSM Act and accurate minutes kept of these decisions.

If your issues and approvals are being handled via email without duly formed meetings then the approval may not be valid and the lack of a proper meeting is the real issue.

Fortunately there are no real strata police and you can probably get away with what you are doing even though it is not compliant as long as nothing serious comes of anything you decide or approve.

Drop by the SCA website (HERE) and have a look at the free training; it is fairly extensive and offer a good starting point for those uninitiated in strata.

Our EC quite often approves various things out of session by email when it is something really simple and exactly the same as things we have approved previously, consistent with our published guidelines etc. However, we then make a point of minuting such approvals at our next formal meeting. If the proposal is more complex or unusual we wait till our next formal meeting which is typically about once every 2 months. 

Dear all,

There are at times reasons to address matters informally between committee meetings however there are still statutory requirements contained within the act regarding how an Owners Corporation and also EC make decisions and this all stems back to allowing proper democratic process to occur.

An EC must formalise any decisions they want to make via a committee meeting, giving 72 hours notice, either by placing notice on the notice board (if the by-laws for the scheme require the scheme to have a notice board and the scheme has a notice board), or sending notice to all owners. This is to allow owners (1/3) the opportunity to object to a decision the EC are seeking to make.

It is good to have discussion and a lot of this can occur via email/phone prior to the meeting so that the decisions at the meeting can be simple yes or no decisions on the detailed agenda that is distributed before the meeting, making the meeting efficient, but still allowing healthy debate on any matter required.

If the EC enact a decision without proper process any individual owner could object to this, taking the matter to the CTTT and have the decision and action overturned, which could prove costly to the OC.

Mr S

The problem with being too pedantic and formal for simple approvals is that owners get frustrated at having simple matters held up waiting for approval so they go ahead in any case. This breeds a culture in which approvals are not sought and regrettable changes are made, not always bad enough to justify heavy-handed action to reverse but part of a gradual erosion of the appearance of the property. Prompt approval by email with later minuting at a formal meeting encourages people to do the right thing and get approval. That makes it easier for the committee to intervene before it is too late to get improvements in owners' proposals that avoid the cumulative erosion of the architectural style of our set of townhouses. 

In practice, past committees have been very timid about reversing unilateral actions of owners so it is good to develop a culture of compliance. Our present committee is the first in 30 years (to my knowledge) to issue Article Infringement Notices (after talking and nice letters), the first step in the formal process leading to a ruling from ACAT (the ACT equivalent of CTTT). All that is to remove some fences erected by owners on common property, that would be within our power to just demolish if we cared to go that way.