Board voting procedure on small items to be purchased.

Boards are typically made up of people who lack any training or experience in managing a business and whose one and only qualification is that they bought a home within the boundaries of the association.

The board should have put together a budget for for office expenses and delegated the purchases to someone (anyone). The good news is that by focusing their discussions on a $5 timer and a $40 fan they were not screwing up something important. But I do hope they had a vigorous debate and allowed homeowners to add their comments at a meaningful time before the vote was taken to approve these items. Will next month's agenda include discussion and a vote to buy more paper clips?

Yes, the meeting was necessary.

Another option would have been an action without a meeting.
This would have required a 100% prior approval from all board members (perhaps via e-mail) and then mention it in the next scheduled meeting and attach the e-mails as proof of approval to those minutes. Sometimes, an action without meeting is more work than simply holding the meeting.

Bruce, Tim, and Melissa:

Your responses show exactly why none of you serve on a real board of directors.

The board should have appointed officers to handle the day-to-day operations of the association. That's what officers do. The board should have also budgeted money for small office items and delegated the purchase of these things to the officers. This is not at all dependent upon the size of the association or the size of the budget. The board should delegate petty and/or routine matters to the officers. There is no circumstance under which a $5.00 purchase should ever be on any board's agenda.

One of the hallmarks of inexperienced managers is an inability to delegate. Someone who has the need to micromanage a $5.00 purchase has no business making decisions that will effect the values of several million dollars worth of homes.

Welcome to the Forum, Judith. If you need to hire (yes, licensed) electricians to install the fan and even the timer, the costs will be higher.
And sometimes, the Board needs to make decisions about things like the style/color of the fan especially if it's going in a nice common area amenity.

About a year ago, a homeowner wrote requesting that the board purchase a large clock to mount in the pool area so that lap swimmers--like her--wouldn't have to bring their watches to the pool to know how long they've been swimming. Ditto other pool users wouldn't need to bring watches. Great idea! But the board was concerned that it wouldn't be attractive-one director even thought it would look junky. (We're a urban high rise HOA).

The Board kicked it down to the Building Committee (BC) that often recommends improvements to the Board and takes aesthetics into account. A BC member who also swims laps brought several online pics to the BC of samples of clocks that she thought would be attractive in appearance and that also would withstand being installed in almost full sun.

The BC selected one to recommend to the Board and the Board, which normally meets once a month, approved it. So this took three months! The cost of the clock was $89 plus battery changes every so often. Our engineers did the electrical.

My point is, I guess, that there are pretty good reasons for some modest purchases to be decided by the Board especially if they are additions to our common areas. If the original requester had brought three sample pics for the board to review, we probably could have made a choice that evening.

One more reason why small matters should be delegated. Three months of full board meetings to decide on a freaking $89 clock. Anyone else would have picked up a clock at Staples and had it hung on the wall in about 15 minutes.

But there is, as usual, a silver lining. By spending three months on focused on making a trivial decision it means the board had less time to screw up anything important. Keep up the good work.

BTW, have you scheduled a debate over the merits of plastic versus metal paper clips? That ought to be worth at least six meetings.

Well, Larry, our Rules & Regs state that no individual may place items in the common areas without board approval. I like the rule as it prevents odd sofas from showing up in our lounges or lobbies, funky exercise equipment being "donated" to our gym, or some generous soul's old rose bushes from being planted in our tropical planters and pots. In addition, no one except our engineers is insured to climb ladders or do electrical work. The clock installation required both.

Needless to say, Larry, the board conducted a lot more business than merely the purchase of the clock at the relevant board meetings. It's pure hyperbole for you to suggest that we spent three "whole board meetings" on the topic.

As I obviously failed to explain clearly, items to be installed in our common areas--that are highly visible to us and our guests--often can and do take board action, no matter what the cost, in our 200+ unit twin high rises for both aesthetic & practical reasons. We have a contract with a vendor who delivers restroom and janitorial supplies, and our PM certainly has a budget for all office supplies. The $89 example is rare as most of the purchase requests brought to the board are for much more than that.

Our annual budget is over $2 mill., so most of our day-to-day operations are handled by our GM and her asst. mgr. If their tasks fell on us 7 directors, I promise you that no one would serve on our board.

Bruce points out that different HOAs have different needs based on size and complexity and as others have pointed out, assignments to the PM or to various officers are part of evolving processes in all sound HOAs.

Larry,

I might add, I am insulted by your remark. I have managed a rather large research budget for a major communications company and I have owned several businesses. I wholeheartedly agree with the concept of delegating, and it was I who was instrumental in convincing the board that they had more important things to do than to micromanage every expense.

Larry,

After further thought, perhaps some of what you say might be true. I last served on our board in 2008. At the annual election, I "retired" and decided not to seek re-election. This past year I was approached by many homeowners to again seek election to the board. As one homeowner put it to me, "our board needs adult supervision." I decided at the last minute to submit my name for re-election and won handily. Hopefully, in the next two years I can teach the board how to manage.

Following this topic is proof positive many who serve have no real business ever doing so.

Meeting to approve spending $5 is IMO a joke.

And spending 3 months seeking the approval of close to 15 people to determine which clock should be purchased so swimmers can keep track of time well I would have kept that tale to myself.

Our budget is just under $400,000 per year not that this matters. As President I take on most maintenance issues on the property and ok any expenditure if needed when necessary. I make purchases authorize work and then bring the Board up to speed at the next meeting.

I like to get things done and have eliminated anything that prevents me from doing so. Evidently, some folks see the purcahse of an $89 clock after 3 months as an accomplishment. I could do that in less than an hour!

So, if you are elected to the board you are automatically an aesthetique.

Can't help but recall a TV story from a number of years ago where random Americans were shown pictures of famous paintings and asked to identify them. The "Mona Lisa" and the "Last Supper" did OK, Munch's "The Scream" and Hopper's "The Nighthawks" did not do so well, but 100% of those surveyed correctly identified "Dogs Playing Poker."

In a country where "Dogs Playing Poker" is the most recognized work of art, I expect far more kitsch than good decorating taste from a board of directors of a condo or any other run-of-the-mill group.

Larry, you draw a very odd conclusion; "Recognizing" dog-poker art and wanting to purchase it are two very different things.

Take another kind of art-music. I recognize many styles of music, but there are a couple of styles that I will never purchase.

My conclusion is that a 7-member board of directors with a $2,000,000 annual budget that takes three months plus referrals to building committees to purchase and install an $89 clock has demonstrated such extremely poor judgment that whatever they finally settled on will be less like Shinola and more like that other stuff.