Paying for routine expenses

Our condo by laws "rights normally vested in a president of an organization." There are no more specific authorizations that I can find. How do we pay for a $1,000 repair without a board meeting? We have a maintenance budget so can the president authorize payments?

In general my feeling is that the board should approve of any expenditure, or specifically delegate that authority.

I would suggest that the if the board as a whole does not feel the need to approve certain payments, then a motion should be made to document that. It is not unusual for a board to delegate authority to the president or some other board member to spend up to a specified amount on budgeted items like repairs.

A $1000 repair, unless previously delegated to the President to decide alone, should be made by the Board as a whole.

Upgrading a mailing from black & white to color at a cost of $100 (or other low reasonable amount) can be made by the President alone. I would not categorize a $1000 repair as that.

However, if the $1000 repair is obviously necessary and urgent, I suppose the President could authorize it and ask for forgiveness later. For example, a roof leak in a condo might require a $1000 temporary repair that the president might authorize if he had a good vendor lined up.

I have served on previous groups of Board members where one outspoken person didn't want to waste his time on $1000 contracts, and thus, he didn't want to spend Board meeting time on them. So I think it partly depends on the group principles as well.

In order to cut down on meetings I asked the Board for authorization to approve any expenditure for $1,000 or less. They happily approved it via a formal vote.

Bill D,
In the 2 HOA boards I have been a part of in Ca. and Texas the rules were clear. The PM had a not to exceed number for misc. expenses and the President had a spending level usually double that number for emergencies. Ours were fairly large HOAs and the limit was $500 for PM and $1000 for the President. All of this emergency spending were always communicated clearly to the board by email or at the next meeting.