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condo board
Feb. 14th, 2013 06:32 pmSo, having attended the general meeting portion of the monthly condo board meetings every month since I moved here, I let myself get talked into being appointed as an interim member to fill a vacant spot, at the January meeting. The February meeting, this past Monday, was my first as a board member. I have not finished reading the vast binder of info yet, much less prior year audits and tax returns - I am going to be put in charge of finding a new CPA to do those for this year. (No, I can't do it, even if my CPA license were on active status rather than inactive, because the auditor has to be independent.) Already did some work with the gas billing accounts - an arcane system of submetering and billing, and we can't shut off anyone's gas for nonpayment because the BGE accounts are per building, that's why we have the submetering, and the submetering company doesn't do collection stuff on past due bills, and so on. So I just played with spreadsheets and developed a quick system of filtering out which accounts should be sent nasty letters as of the current month, which accounts should be referred to legal action because they're over 90 days, and also highlights a few other kinds of problems - people with zero usage this month even though as far as we know the unit's not vacant, what's that about? and people with huge single-month bills more than twice the average for that size unit. Nobody else thinks we should do anything about those people, they're just focused on collection, but sometime down the road I hope to talk the board into being proactive in helping people not get behind in the first place, by having more control and awareness of their energy usage.
Anyway, this past Monday night was my first board meeting, as I said. And most of the way through the meeting, after we had already allocated a bunch of tasks, whoop! Office manager hands in her resignation. (Note I am not naming names, either of her or of the condo association.) Effective next week. So, tonight, emergency meeting, to discuss whether to bribe her with more money (but does that merely postpone the issue of someone who is obviously unhappy here, and who would, if she accepted that, be reneging on the other job she supposedly had accepted?) or hire someone new and if so how and how fast.
Deep end of the pool here, peeps. Good thing I'm reasonably fast at learning to swim.
ETA:
The board decided to offer her lots more money, and we also got more other stuff done than we had on Monday - it's much easier to get moving on stuff when we don't have to wait for all the residents to speak up and then get herded out so that we can have just the board. We got some maintenance decisions made - board members are going to be on call at night for emergencies for a few weeks while office manager struggles with family problems - we're rotating weeks, and we hope that by the time 4 people have each spent a week getting emergency calls from residents at night that aren't really emergencies, we will have (a) figured out a better way to get through to people that maintenance issues are not 2 a.m. emergencies, and (b) figured out a different way to deal with the late-night calls that will come in anyway. The real problem is people who are renting their units from owners; the renters seem to think that we are an apartment complex and that the office is going to fix their plumbing, electrical, heat, etc. We need to get across to them that there are only 3 things that are enough of an emergency to call anybody at 2 a.m.: fire - in which case they should be calling 911, not our office; smelling gas - ditto 911; and water pouring from the ceiling - which is the only one of the 3 where someone on site needs to respond immediately and see whether the water needs to be shut off because it's a between-units problem, or whether it's something just in their own unit - and whether their idea of water pouring from the ceiling is actually a pinpoint leak in the shower plumbing... No heat is not an emergency on our part; unit owners own their own furnaces and are responsible for repairs. No hot water is not an emergency - it's the complex's responsibility to fix, but it won't be done at 2 a.m., it will be reported to the manager in the morning and a plumber will be called during normal hours. Electrical outages are not an emergency, and anyway they should be calling either their landlord (the owner of the unit), or BG&E. And hurricanes are an emergency, but not one we can do a damn thing about while the hurricane is ongoing. That should cover most things. Water leaks seem to be the most common thing that people call about, and the vast majority of them turn out to be things in the plumbing that belongs to the unit owner, not in the plumbing that belongs to the building.
And I need to get an article written to that effect, only more polite, written for the two-or-three-times-a-year newsletter that goes to all units.
And Friday morning we got my signature added to the bank account, and geez, this is going to be work.
Anyway, this past Monday night was my first board meeting, as I said. And most of the way through the meeting, after we had already allocated a bunch of tasks, whoop! Office manager hands in her resignation. (Note I am not naming names, either of her or of the condo association.) Effective next week. So, tonight, emergency meeting, to discuss whether to bribe her with more money (but does that merely postpone the issue of someone who is obviously unhappy here, and who would, if she accepted that, be reneging on the other job she supposedly had accepted?) or hire someone new and if so how and how fast.
Deep end of the pool here, peeps. Good thing I'm reasonably fast at learning to swim.
ETA:
The board decided to offer her lots more money, and we also got more other stuff done than we had on Monday - it's much easier to get moving on stuff when we don't have to wait for all the residents to speak up and then get herded out so that we can have just the board. We got some maintenance decisions made - board members are going to be on call at night for emergencies for a few weeks while office manager struggles with family problems - we're rotating weeks, and we hope that by the time 4 people have each spent a week getting emergency calls from residents at night that aren't really emergencies, we will have (a) figured out a better way to get through to people that maintenance issues are not 2 a.m. emergencies, and (b) figured out a different way to deal with the late-night calls that will come in anyway. The real problem is people who are renting their units from owners; the renters seem to think that we are an apartment complex and that the office is going to fix their plumbing, electrical, heat, etc. We need to get across to them that there are only 3 things that are enough of an emergency to call anybody at 2 a.m.: fire - in which case they should be calling 911, not our office; smelling gas - ditto 911; and water pouring from the ceiling - which is the only one of the 3 where someone on site needs to respond immediately and see whether the water needs to be shut off because it's a between-units problem, or whether it's something just in their own unit - and whether their idea of water pouring from the ceiling is actually a pinpoint leak in the shower plumbing... No heat is not an emergency on our part; unit owners own their own furnaces and are responsible for repairs. No hot water is not an emergency - it's the complex's responsibility to fix, but it won't be done at 2 a.m., it will be reported to the manager in the morning and a plumber will be called during normal hours. Electrical outages are not an emergency, and anyway they should be calling either their landlord (the owner of the unit), or BG&E. And hurricanes are an emergency, but not one we can do a damn thing about while the hurricane is ongoing. That should cover most things. Water leaks seem to be the most common thing that people call about, and the vast majority of them turn out to be things in the plumbing that belongs to the unit owner, not in the plumbing that belongs to the building.
And I need to get an article written to that effect, only more polite, written for the two-or-three-times-a-year newsletter that goes to all units.
And Friday morning we got my signature added to the bank account, and geez, this is going to be work.
