By Jim Pace, April 2020
The Board of Directors has tentatively postponed the Glenabby Condominium Association Annual Unit Owners Meeting until May 27th. But as of 4/10/2020, it's unclear when public meetings will again be permitted. Here’s hoping the Glenabby Board of Directors is thinking about alternative meeting dates or meeting formats.
Our Bylaws require the Associationto have a Unit Owners Meeting annually, in the second quarter of each year, at least by sometime in June. What happens if we haven’t had our meeting by the end of June? Are we breaking the law? The Board legal counsel might be able to answer that.
The community could change this by an Amendment, I suppose. That requiries an affirmative vote by 75% of the Unit Owners. It’s a bit more complicated than that but that’s the short summary. Needless to say, the process should be started pretty soon if that is to happen.
Here are my thoughts:
If the pandemic is still going on, a bad idea would be to have everyone meet, as usual, in the clubhouse. (REALLY BAD IDEA).
Meet outside in the field behind the clubhouse. Allow for physical separation (including Board members). Use a PA system. Election Officials (property manager, lawyer, any other ballot counters or observers) wear Personal Protective Equipment (maybe just masks and gloves?). Sanitize the handouts, ballots, pens, proxy forms, tables, chairs, clubhouse (if used for counting). Actually, you might need masks for everyone, just to be sort of safe.
What about a quorum? You need a quorum to hold a meeting. Actually, it looks like you only need one Unit Owner to be present to have a quorum! Could that one Unit Owner be one of the Directors? If nobody else showed up, could the Directors just vote in the new Directors? Scary thought.
Have everybody vote by proxy (Read “What is a Proxy and why do we use them?”). Of course, you have to designate someone to be your proxy and they have to show up at the meeting. You could specify a Board member to be your proxy. You could also leave the proxy field blank, in which case the Board would decide how the proxy is handled. In my opinion, an individual holding more than one proxy (sometimes called, “proxy hoarding”) is dangerous. And letting Board members vote as proxies is even more dangerous.
Maybe we could have a Condo-wide video chat. Everyone with a computer logs on to a session and votes with their computer. Lots of details to work on with that. Anyone without a computer (if there are only a few) meets at the clubhouse, wearing their “Personal Protective Equipment” (PPE) and maintaining Physical Separation to vote in person.
These are just a few ideas I came up with and some of them are pretty half-baked. With the five Board members working together they could probably generate additional (maybe better) ideas. If you have any thoughts, why not send them to the Board of Directors or the property manager. Maybe you could even use the Forum on TownSq. But you might be better off sending an email...