Condo Media - August 2009 - 28

COVER STORY will use to gauge the effectiveness of the trustees and the management team. This creates a challenge, but also an opportunity boards should use to highlight their achievements, describe the issues they have confronted and the challenges ahead, and to seek feedback from owners on their priorities and concerns. For many communities, the biggest challenge at the annual meeting is attracting enough owners to meet the quorum requirements. For this reason, many communities make the annual meeting a social event — serving refreshments before the meeting or having a cookout afterward. Publishing a notice of the meeting, distributing meeting materials and the agenda well in advance and sending several intermediate reminders can help; going door-to-door inviting owners in person also may boost attendance. It is important to make owners who do attend the meeting feel welcome and included. The chairperson should thank everyone for coming and explain the proceedings clearly as he or she moves through the agenda. One goal of the annual meeting is to encourage a sense of community; you want owners to feel like insiders, not outsiders, at the proceedings. Make the meeting informative, but don’t overwhelm owners with information. You don’t want owners to leave the meeting vowing never to attend another one. Have board members provide concise summaries of their reports rather than reading them word-for-word. Owners who want more detail can read the full reports, which should be included in the materials distributed before the meeting. Quorum Call Despite their best efforts, some boards find themselves without a quorum at the annual meeting, making it impossible to elect trustees (usually the major Building Envelope Restoration Specialists BEFORE AFTER Serving New England Building Owners Since 1981 • Concrete Restoration • Façade Inspection & Repair • Masonry Restoration • Sealant Removal & Replacement • Parking Garage Repair & Traffic Coatings • Specialty Coatings • Waterproofing Systems • Roofing: Flat, Slate, Copper, Sheet Metal • Roofing Maintenance • Emergency Repairs item on the annual meeting agenda) or do anything else requiring a vote of owners. Even without a quorum, boards can still present reports and, if they choose, convene an informal town meeting, taking advantage of the opportunity to have an informal giveand-take with owners. But the board will have to schedule a new annual meeting, providing the requisite advance notice, in order to conduct association business. Allowing and even encouraging owners to vote by proxy is one way to deal with the quorum problem — a strategy most documents allow. But the overuse of proxies can itself create problems: The more votes cast by proxy and the more proxies cast by a single owner, the more suspect the process may seem to others. Proxies also have the potential for abuse. Board members or owners have been known to pressure residents to vote a certain way or mislead them about the votes they were casting. Tightening the proxy process by requiring proxies to be notarized, for example, or by limiting the number of proxy votes a single owner can cast, can reduce the potential for abuse. But making the proxy procedures too difficult or too burdensome also may discourage owners from using this alternative; owners who aren’t able or willing to vote by proxy may end up not voting at all. Another way of dealing with a chronic quorum problem is to have owners vote to amend the association bylaws to reduce the quorum requirement. This is hardly an ideal solution, however. A community association is supposed to be a participatory democracy; instead of reducing the attendance requirement for annual meetings, it would be better to find ways to encourage more owners to exercise their right and fulfill their obligation to participate in the decisions affecting their community. CM Nena Groskind is vice president of eContentplus, providing editorial content for Web sites, print and electronic newsletters and magazines. 617-628-8888 28 CONDO MEDIA • AUGUST 2009 www.weatherproofing.net

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Condo Media - August 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Condo Media - August 2009