Special payment to outgoing Secretary of EC

Ask for further details from the strata manager e.g. number of hours and rate per hour, copies of receipts or further details for phone calls, printing and postage costs. This could easily be provided by the secretary and demonstrates transparency. Usually payments are agreed in advance by owners at the AGM for designated member/s of the Executive Committee for phone calls and printing costs. Some owners corporations support reimbursement for costs incurred particularly for those volunteers on the Executive Committees on fixed incomes and are agreed up front and in advance.

@eddie said:
I don’t know amount of time & effort spent but isn’t that what I pay a strata, building & property manager to do?

What you haven’t told us is:

1) How many Lots in your scheme?

2) What proportion of your annual budget does $6.6K represent?

3) How many past years does this honorarium cover? Just last year, or many years of tireless voluntary effort?

You seem a little unclear on the roles of various managers and the EC.

The Strata Manager (SM) is largely administrative. Calling meetings, minuting meetings, issuing levy notices, collecting levies, receiving bills, paying bills, answer correspondence, etc. Some (most?) of them never even visit your building.

Only larger schemes will have a Building Manager (BM), because smaller ones just can’t afford them. Their role is to fix things, either personally, or by arranging a tradesman, and to organise and supervise scheduled maintenance such as painting.

I don’t understand the inclusion of a Property Manager (PM). That term is usually reserved for the “Leasing Agent” of a landlord, and so deals only with the Lot.

But, there are some things that simply cannot be delegated to the SM or the BM, and they are:

1) The Owner’s taste. Suppose you want a boundary fence erected. If you delegate that “bare” requirement to the SM/BM, you will get their taste, or the tradesman’s taste. Someone from the EC/OC must specify the requirements. How much of the boundary? What material (barbed wire, brick/stone, brushwood, flat metal, tubular metal, height, colour, etc.)?

2) The “noticing” of things which need fixing, and communicating with the SM/BM about them.

3) If you don’t have a BM, the arranging of access so the work can be done, and the supervision of the work to ensure things go right and the OC gets “value for money”.

And that’s the sort of voluntary work your EC does for you.

Hi Eddie

Having spent a lot of my time on Executive Committees I’m happy to do it without recompense for the majority of owners who appreciate it.   It takes too much time to painstakingly detail all the phone calls, photocopies, postage etc for my liking.  Though there are owners out there who continually complain, and take up an inordinate amount of time of the Executive Committee over trivial matters.  I’d say that in the past I’ve spent 80% of my time on 20% of the owners.  The worst complainants are often the non-resident owners who don’t bother to attend meetings or even put in a proxy, and expect the resident owners on committees to ensure that they keep up the value of their properties with little or no investment, and endure the mess and abuse of their tenants.   In strata schemes where there is a large proportion of non-resident owners I’d maintain it just isn’t fair to expect the few resident owners available to be on committees to do the work for nothing, where the majority of owners are only in it for purely financial reasons.  Some schemes do leave it all to the Managing Agent but in my books having it unsupervised by an EC doesn’t result in the best outcomes for the property.

That’s your EC, What about when an office-bearer has done sterling wol filling in the gaps left by strata managers?
Every building is different. You really shouldn’t apply your frustrations to other people’s circumstances.
I know some EC secretaries who deserve a medal … and I know some who deserve a bullet. There are no hard and fast rules,