Self Management Question

NP,

What we do is delegate. There is no reason for 3 Directors/Officers to meet to look at a broken water pipe. For us, the maintenance officer would look at the pipe and send a report to all Directors along with an action without meeting (AWM) request to fund the repairs. In absent of an AWM, an emergency/special meeting of the Board would be called.

A repair or something similar, falls the Article that gives the board permission to take actions without a board meeting. It would seem this was included for just this purpose. A repair wouldn't and or couldn't wait for a board meeting, open or closed. Nor would it take a vote of any kind to fix it. Right?

It would seem that general maintenance or repair would fall backwards to the reserves, where money has already been put away for such things, thereby not needing the open meeting requirement.

For openers, it is important to note that PA is not an open meeting state. Also, although we do use an MC, it is only for accounting and financial transaction management - We do our own budgeting, vendor contracting, and site management.

In the original post, I gave the example of a broken water pipe, but that as it turns out was really too simplistic. So I would like to offer some real world examples.

1. We have five different vendors who help us care for our grounds: Landscaping company, tree maintenance company, arborist, landscape designer, and groundskeeper. The groundskeeper is a single individual who we pay on a time and materials basis to do the odds and end jobs that the landscape company crews don't do to our satisfaction or at a price we are willing to pay. From time to time, and at least once a year, we walk the grounds with each of these vendors.

2. We have a single water meter that serves the entire community. There are no as-installed plans for where our water mains are located. We believe we have one or more leaks, and we have done everything we could to get any in-house leaks repaired. We have had close to a dozen contractors walk the grounds with us to get bids on the next stage of investigation. Different contractors have come up with different ideas about how things are laid out underground. The majority of contractors did the walk but never gave us a proposal of what they could do for us.

3. Next week the entire board (or whoever winds up being available) intends to sit together to listen to a webinar in one of the board member's homes. We will probably talk among ourselves about the topic of the webinar. No pre-announcement to the community and no invitation to homeowners to join us. Our focus is on building the collective skill set of the board members so that anyone can fill in for anyone else.

I am retired. So I generally have the time (and need for exercise) to go on all of the walks. Although I could be the designated person as Tim recommends, I don't like this arrangement. If something happened to me, then the rest of the board would be stuck. I would like to plan to someday be off the board, and I would like as many others to be as knowledgeable as possible. So when we do a walk, every board member is invited. There is a world of difference between direct observation and reading or listening to a recitation of a report.

Sometimes I am the only walker. Sometimes, I'm not available and others walk instead. Sometimes the entire board walks. Sometimes committee members walk. The invitation is always open to whoever can make it. The good news IMO is that every board member voluntarily walks when available on the issues he or she cares about the most. Recruitment to join the board is always an issue, but with our approach, we are never concerned about board member apathy.

If PA became an open meeting state, I'm not sure that it would be an improvement over what we have now. IMO, there is something to be said for Darlene's HOA's approach.