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Posted By CathyA3 on 07/20/2021 11:25 AM
State legislators generally decide whether to prioritize maximum transparency (open meeting states) or maximum flexibility (board meetings may be closed and action without a meeting is allowed at any time as long as the board members are unanimous and the decisions are documented in minutes).
There are trade-offs and consequences for both choices. Your opinion will probably be colored by your community's experiences. Do you have a history of the board operating in secret and not sharing information - in which case you'd prefer the laws requiring open meetings. Or do you have a well-organized group of troublemakers who are hamstringing ineffectual board members and nothing gets done - in which case you may wish that the board could just get on with it by themselves.
As Jack noted, requiring that all business be conducted in noticed meetings does slow down an already slow process. Based my experience in a closed meeting state, we had the most trouble remembering to document decisions made via email - I had to schedule it as monthly task or it would have gotten lost.
I wish there would be a workable middle ground between the two extremes, though, or a way to let boards move between extremes when necessary.
I'm all in favor of open transparency, but don't see a volunteer group of people are expected to never use e-mail to make a decision yet effectively manage an association or building. If we only made decisions 1 time per month, or 1 time per quarter, it'd be hard to get things done. Ultimately, we'd be offloading a lot more decision making ability to our property manager which really isn't much different than making decisions by e-mail.
Can you imagine every time a gate breaks, leaving it broken for a month until a meeting is held? What about broken sprinkler heads? Should the decision to repair those also be made at the monthly meeting. How about a decision to direct a landscaper to replace a shrub that died? Our meetings would go on for hours and hours if every decision (maintenance and otherwise) was done by vote at a meeting.
On the other hand, I understand that big decisions like setting the 2022 annual budget, making the decision on $100,000 park renovation, or terminating the current landscaper and replacing with a new landscaper are decisions that need to happen during meetings. You get better conversation about these subjects at a meeting than you do by e-mail.
But little decisions like described above, especially maintenance tasks just to maintain the community, need to be made in between meetings if the community stays looking sharp. I just don't see any way to defer maintenance decisions to a monthly or quarterly meeting.