Tag: Meeting Minutes

Anticipating risks and then coming up with reasonable, cost-effective, and practical ways to reduce them is a large part of being an effective association manager. Because you and your staff are at the community day-in and day-out working on everything from dealing with the board to making sure that landscaping projects are going well to responding to members’ complaints or questions, you’re in the unique position of seeing potential problems before they arise.

You know that organization is one of the keys to association management success, especially if you’re in charge of a larger community or one with many members. If you did an annual spring cleaning this year, you might also have realized that you need to cut down on clutter in your office, which might include boxes of association records—which can get sizable if they include accounting records, membership lists, meeting minutes, and other important papers—that the association has accumulated over the years. So, what should an association do with old records?

Age-restricted communities provide a great alternative for elderly people who want to stay active and remain in their homes rather than move into to a nursing or assisted living facility. If you manage an age-restricted community, you'll face some special management concerns about the declining health of the community's members. As time goes on and residents get older, some may start to suffer from dementia or other mental problems that can lead to sometimes violent or otherwise dangerous behavior.

Community members may want to inspect the records of their association for a variety of reasons, some legitimate and some improper. It may be hard to tell whether a member wants access to records for a harmless reason, to harass the association, to gather confidential information to which the member isn't entitled, or for information that will support his case if he's planning to sue the association. This makes it difficult to know when to grant and when to deny requests when they're made.

Many record inspection requests by members are legitimate and take relatively little office time. Unfortunately, sometimes requests may be driven by unfounded suspicions, with the intent to harass the board or manager. Also, these requests may be attempts to gather confidential information to which members are not entitled so that they may sue the association or other members. Therefore, to protect the interests of the association, it is important for board members to know which requests to grant and which to deny.

Defamation is the communication of a statement that makes a false claim, expressively stated or implied to be factual, that may harm the reputation of an individual. In a community association context, defamation lawsuits typically arise when an association distributes information on delinquent members.You can distribute the names of members who are delinquent in their…