Tag: Meeting Minutes

When a board member gives up her position, your association will have the sometimes difficult task of replacing the outgoing member. But the challenging part of replacing a member comes after the new member is found and elected to the board. That’s because, depending upon the new member’s experience with your association, or associations generally, there may be a lot of information for him to quickly get up to speed on—especially if big decisions are in the process of being made.

Privacy issues have always been taken into consideration when it comes to issues like medical information, but it might not occur to community members that seemingly more casual items are protected from general knowledge. So community members who want to inspect the records of their association—for a variety of reasons, some legitimate and some improper—might not realize that these records aren’t automatically free game.

Finances are a huge consideration for community association boards and managers. It takes money—and sometimes lots of it—to keep a community or condominium building up to high standards and running smoothly. If you manage an association or serve on your association’s board of directors, you already know that almost everything you do depends to some degree on whether you have a budget that you can work with realistically.

To encourage member participation in community affairs, many boards permit association members to attend and speak at board meetings, even when the bylaws do not give the members that right. But if a member speaks too long, rambles off topic, or intentionally antagonizes the board or other members, he makes it hard for the meeting to be productive.

Age-restricted communities have become a real force in the housing market, providing a great alternative for elderly people who want to stay active and remain in their homes rather than move into nursing homes or assisted living facilities as past generations often did. But they’ve also presented challenges for their associations—members who are “aging in place” at such communities are more likely to develop medical problems or issues that are an inevitable part of getting older.

Preparing community association meeting minutes may seem like it’s just a matter of “taking notes.” But don’t be fooled into thinking that minutes are merely a record of what has happened at meetings. Meeting minutes are not only a way to refer back to decisions that affect the way you manage the community now, they could also have serious legal significance for the association later.

Inevitably, a community’s on-site manager—an employee of the association—or management company will part ways with the association at some point. If the manager has acted responsibly and fulfilled her duties during her tenure, a transition to new management might be easier than if your association manager is leaving on bad terms because of unprofessional or even illegal behavior.

While board members have what’s known as a “fiduciary duty” to the association, some members—especially those who are at odds with choices the association has made—mistakenly think that the board should serve their particular interests. That goes squarely against the concept of fiduciary duty—that is, a legal obligation imposed on all board members to be loyal to the association.

by Jim Slaughter, Esq.

There are more than 320,000 community associations in the United States, according to the Community Associations Institute. Think of all the membership, board, and committee meetings that take place! Since statutes and governing documents often require such meetings to follow certain rules, it’s important for managers and board members to know about parliamentary procedure, which, when used properly, can also serve to streamline meetings and make association life easier and more productive for everyone.

Community association managers today have to keep up with ever-changing technological, financial, legal, and management trends. But one thing largely stays the same: the language in many associations’ governing documents and other materials. Typically, this language hasn’t been updated in several decades, despite a drastic change in membership demographics. And that can create frustration among members whose cultural understanding of certain terms is at odds with the meaning the terms were originally supposed to convey.