Can the Quorum be lowered if members don't participate?

Started by JohnM102 • 4 replies • 344 views

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JohnM102 (Arizona)
Posts: 24

Posted:

We have 100 owners/members in our Arizona HOA. We have never met the 50% required participation. When we fail, we wait the required 72 hours and schedule a second meeting. Our rules allow us to drop the 50% participation to 25% after the first meeting. Unfortunately, most times we even fail to meet the 25% requirement. Our CC&Rs do not allow the participation to go below the 25%. Is there a way to legally reduce the quorum even below the 25%? I know we can change the CC&Rs to lower the quorum requirement even lower but to do that we need a quorum of the members which we can't get to participate. Were kind in a catch 22 situation. Any thoughts?

KerryL1 (California)
Posts: 14,550

Posted:

First, are you making voting as easy as possible for owners? May they mail in absentee ballots? Or must attendance be in person or by proxy? These are almost always in your Bylaws not CC&Rs, btw. So to change to a lower quorum for director elections, you'd need to change your Bylaws. And, yes, that might require a simple majority of Owners.

If mail-in voting is permitted, try sending out the election materials with a stamped return envelope for the ballot.

AZ statutes seem to be pretty owner friendly. Have air looked at the ones that apply to your type of assn. for guidance?

TimB4 (Tennessee)
Posts: 21,059

Posted:

You must change the governing docs to legally change the quorum requirements.

Unfortunately, AZ does not allow voting by proxy.
Therefore, it would take a lot of door knocking and signed¬arized statements to amend the documents.

WendyM5 (North Carolina)
Posts: 1,522

Posted:

https://www.fsresidential.com/arizona/news-events/articles/electronic-voting-in-arizona-what-you-should-know/

az allows online voting. vote electronically online. we used an online service that was only $30
we veritified votes by making people put in their account number which shows up on their hoa dues bills. you can also have the online system send the owner a code via email to verify them.

IN NC we can have the online voting last as long as we want. we had it last 2 months and got about 1/3 of the community to vote the first time we treid it. the online voting can replace a regular meeting in NC. might be same where you live?

Also I've read posts here in the past that have the 2nd meeting 10 minutes after the first one and everyone is notified of this arrangement when the annual meeting notes are sent out.

lastly getting 25% quorum is not that hard IF you put in annual meeting notice that you will be doing something that will increase their dues a lot or have a vote on a special assessment. Say some people want a pool. you can put down the community will vote on a $800 special assessment to fund a pool. Just beaware that it might succeed. I know for a fact that would fail where I live, but consider the ramifications of what is proposed. While a lot of people here claim owners will never vote for a price increase my own votes have shown otherwise.

best thing to do is to vote first on reducing the quorum.

vis ta vie

MichaelT21 (Arkansas)
Posts: 200

Posted:

Quote:

Posted By JohnM102 on 01/19/2023 6:42 PM
We have 100 owners/members in our Arizona HOA. We have never met the 50% required participation. When we fail, we wait the required 72 hours and schedule a second meeting. Our rules allow us to drop the 50% participation to 25% after the first meeting. Unfortunately, most times we even fail to meet the 25% requirement. Our CC&Rs do not allow the participation to go below the 25%. Is there a way to legally reduce the quorum even below the 25%? I know we can change the CC&Rs to lower the quorum requirement even lower but to do that we need a quorum of the members which we can't get to participate. Were kind in a catch 22 situation. Any thoughts?

I'll second electronic voting. We do that and will probably get 40 - 45% participation this year. It takes 30 seconds to vote and is easy.

With that said, 50% participation is hard especially in an organization that most don't care about. I agree changing the by-laws to allow for a lower quorum level may be worth your time. 25% is reasonable for us with electronic voting.

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