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PaulH3 (Connecticut)
Posts: 29
Posted:
Our Bylaws state:

“Section 3.1 – Annual Meeting
Annual meetings of the Unit Owners shall be held during the first week of November. At such meeting, the Directors shall be elected by ballot of the Unit Owners, in accordance with the provisions of Article II. The Unit Owners may transact other business at such meetings as may properly come before them.”

I think that is pretty clear. However, I contacted our management company to find out if they knew exactly when and where the meeting would be held. The response I got was along the lines of, “We manage a lot of developments that are from the same developer. They have the same exact clause in the Bylaws of all the HOAs that were created by them. We do not have the time for another annual meeting at the beginning of November.”

What do we do?

1.We could hold the meeting outside of the first week of November, but that would be in violation of the Bylaws.

2.Changing the Bylaws would be out of the question since we don't have the time necessary to notify the Unit Owners, assemble a meeting and vote.

3.We could hold the meeting without the management company being present. However, I believe that their participation would be necessary to help address some of the questions that are bound to come up from the Unit Owners.

4.Last, we could insist that the management company make a representative available to participate at our annual meeting. The agreement that is in place with the management company clearly defines that they are to attend Association member meetings annually. They signed a contract that stated that the meeting is held during the first week in November. That same contract also states that they agreed to attend.

Do we hold their “feet to the fire” and insist that they attend the meeting during the period defined?
HaroldS (Arizona)
Posts: 906
Posted:
Paul - they have already told you your association is not important to them. I certainly would not beg, threaten or burn their feet. I would go ahead and hold your meeting in compliance with your documents, and then the first order of business for your new board should be to give notice to this "too busy" management company and start looking for one that might want to accommodate you. That is just one of the problems with keeping the developer's management company. Harold
RogerB (Colorado)
Posts: 5,067
Posted:
Paul, I would contact your community manager and require their attendance at the meeting. If they can not attend send a registered letter to the management company and advise this is a violation their Agreement. Also, review your Management Agreement to replace they ASAP.
JosephW (Michigan)
Posts: 882
Posted:
Back in the "dark ages" when I was a manager, almost all of the condo documents in our state were either written by or copied directly from, the same attorney. Every one of them called for the annual meeting to be held on the second Tuesday in March. Obviously, no management company could cover all of the meetings they would have been required to attend. One of the conditions of our contract was that the association would have to amend their documents so that the annual meeting would be on some other date, or we would not be obligated to attend the annual meeting.

Your management company, and I suspect, many of the other management companies in the area, are facing the same problem. They should have notified you, prior to the signing of the contract, about this problem. That failure is on them, so I would require their attendance. However, I would make it a priority to change the annual meeting date in the future. Even if you decide to change companies, you may run into the same problems. Managers generally cover etween 5 and 10 associations and they can't be in 2 places at once.

If I remember correctly, we recommended that the association select a month, rather than a day or week, so the bylaw read something like: "The Annual Meeting of the members will be held during the month of_________, the specifc date to be selected at least 90 days in advance of the meeting and communicated to all owners immediately following its selection". This gave everybody some flexibility.

Joe

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RogerB (Colorado)
Posts: 5,067
Posted:
Joe, I agree with your advice to specify only the month for the annual meeting and not a specific date. Often associations use free locations for the meeting and available sites can be hard to find. Therefore, I have already scheduled annual meetings for January.

In Colorado I believe the notice of the annual meeting must be given no greater than 50 days and no less than 10 days of the meeting. Thus, our Agreements provide for draft annual budgets to be provided to Boards at least 60 days prior to the annual meeting.

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