- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 10 months ago by .
-
Topic
-
Our Strata Committee recently commissioned an audit of our building to get an up-to-date understanding of the state of the building.
At the Strata Committee meeting the builder who did the audit reported that he found many major issues with the building due to lack of maintenance and that the owners urgently needed to take steps to remedy this. In response the Strata Committee said it would simply ‘consider the issue’.
The meeting minutes simply say ‘Report of building audit received’. This is typical of our Strata Committee who pass on very little information to owners.
I believe the report should be circulated to all owners, rather than individual owners having to go to the Strata Manager’s office and pay to look at the document they paid to have done.
What mechanism is there to get the Strata Committee to do this?
Section 4 in Schedule 1, Meeting procedures of owners corporation Strata Act 2015 says:
(1) Any owner, or any person entitled to vote at a general meeting of an owners corporation, may require a motion to be included in the agenda of the next general meeting of the owners corporation.Section 14 in Schedule 2, Meeting procedures of strata committees just says:
A person is not entitled to move a motion unless the person is entitled to vote on the motion.
Why can owners only put motions to General Meetings? Why can’t they put motions to Strata Committee meetings? What formal mechanism is there to get the Strata Committee to consider doing something?
-
Replies
-
Quite simply. you send a motion to the secretary for inclusion in the next committee meeting agenda that the report be sent to all owners. The motion should be simply worded and non-controversial in itself.
If they refuse to include it, then you have a problem that could be resolved in a number of ways, all of which require time and effort, but probably start with seeking mediation at Fair Trading preparatory to taking a Section 232(2) action at NCAT to compel the committee to distribute the report.
This is obviously ammunition for your next AGM where, as you point out, the secretary MUST include owners’ motions in the agenda.
On a separate housekeeping note to all Flatchatters, the original post above was overloaded with coding that I had to manually remove. If anyone is writing in an Apple format, especially when it also includes material that you have copied and pasted from another source, intending to copy and paste all of that into the Forum, please save the document as a text file (.txt or .rtf) before copying and posting it.
It’s just a couple of clicks on your computer. Life’s too short to do all this afterwards when the coding appears as embedded text and has to be removed line by line.
If you want to be alerted when anyone replies to your posts or responds to this topic, please register and login, then you will be able to subscribe to the topic. The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers. NB: Longer threads may spill over to additional pages - look for the numbers on the bottom right, under the last post.