Management company accountably

Two questions…

One, our HOA does a lot of business throughout the month on email. Of course any motions that pass are unanimous and they are perfectly legal. This helps keep the meetings down to a about 1 hour or so, BUT these motions are never brought up at the meeting or never typed out for meeting notes. I would like to provide better transparency to our members, how does your HOA deal with this?

I thought about writing out meeting notes, since I am the secretary, and announcing the motions that pasted, through email, at the monthly meeting? Thoughts?

Also, how does your HOA keep track of people calling the management company or sending the management company emails? I have reason to believe that our management company is getting calls and emails to report something or to ask a question and they are not being passed to us BOD. How do you make sure that this is not happening in your community and what is a good way to help stop this?

Heather, my answers are:
1) Business conducted via email between meetings should be kept to the bare minimum - to only emergency items. All motions passed outside of Board meetings should be entered into the minutes of the next Board meeting.

2) For the Board members to keep track of who phones or emails to the management company is referred to as micromanaging. Why would you want to be burdened with this? The association hires a management company to relieve Board members of this time consuming task. The management agreement should specify what correspondence should be passed onto the Board between meetings. Examples are: all bids by contractors; significant business matters; and a summary of other key matters in the form of a monthly management report. In the past I have included the number of emails in the monthly manager's report. For example - in one month for an association with 89 units there 124 emails and 26 phone calls; 12 were forwarded to the Board. Most of Board members did not want to receive that many (12) items; they wanted only those items for which action was required before the next Board meeting.

BTW, I experience all the time good Chairpersons limiting Board meetings to "about an hour or so"

You basically answered you own question in the first post. Transparency is the key to a happy and successful HOA /POA. The more inform the neighborhood is, the more peaceful it will become. Harmony being the strength all society, it should especially be yours.
In Florida, E-Mails are considered as legal as first class mail for notifications.
We have a software suite that gave us a website with a forum and a repository where we can upload, keep and retrieve all documents. We communicate through the forum. It has given each of us a voice in the community without fear of retaliation. It has resolved allot of our problems, as the BODs get to read them and address them

All transactions to our association is noted and posted to the website by the secretary’s minutes. All motions and everything that affects our community,

Our server keeps a log and a copy of all E-Mail that is sent directly to the BODs.

I am an advocate of a self managed HOA. If ran properly, it can add a tremendous value to the Association and reduce fees and cost to the home owners.
Third parties running the way I have to live without my voice being heard is like having a dictator I did not elect. Death to all CAMs. Take control of your own destiny!
my2cents - enuff said

Roger,

I am all for that. However, at least two on the board think that is a stupid idea and have said... that is why we pay our managment compney, so we dont have to deal with this stuff.

Up until about month ago when I got elected on the board, I had no idea what anyone's email address were that were on the BOD. If you wished to contact anyone on the BOD you had to go through the PM.

Heather,

Doing business by email or by telephone is ILLEGAL in Florida HOAs. All meetings are to be open to the membership with a 48 hour written notice. Post it, email it or send written notice but ALL meetings must be open to the membership. The only exception is for meetings between the Board and an attorney using client/lawyer privledge.

The Statute is 720:303, (2.b)

As for the management company not passing on calls and emails to the Board, do you know that for sure and are those calls and emails worth passing on? I would like to believe that a professional management company would be smart enough to give the Board messages from calls and mails that are worth passing on. You have to be aware that many, if not most of those are what the British call "dribble"

This thread is over 6 years old, BellaM2. Please start a new thread for your question.

I think you're off a little and thinking of

720.303
(2) BOARD MEETINGS.—
(a) A meeting of the board of directors of an association occurs whenever a quorum of the board gathers to conduct association business. Meetings of the board must be open to all members, except for meetings between the board and its attorney with respect to proposed or pending litigation where the contents of the discussion would otherwise be governed by the attorney-client privilege.

Even still, I think it's very debatable whether email threads count as a gathering. Our bylaws specify that we can do things outside of meeting, but they also specify how to keep things transparent, in that those actions need to be attached to or read into the minutes of the next meeting.