Democracy inaction

[muckefuck]

In the while since I last bitched about the condo association, it hasn't gotten any less depressing or frustrating. My recipe for sanity as a board member is to follow the president's lead while being sure to cover my ass as appropriate. monshu made the mistake by trying to actually lead the board as president, and that's why he got burnt out so quickly.

I think I may have posted already about the owner who got a special exemption to the 20% rental cap a couple years ago in order to rent his place and then missed the deadline to reapply after we'd resolved that we'd start enforcing the cap strictly. First there was a drawn-out argument online where he tried to claim that he hadn't understood the resolution, culminating in a consultation with our lawyer that confirmed our position. Then at the last association meeting he proposed amending the bylaws in order to let non-residents run for board positions.

Since it was a sparsely-attended meeting, we agreed to discuss and submit the measure to a vote online. monshu rolled his eyes at this, as pretty much everyone in the association seems to have a rosier idea of what can resolved by e-mail than he does. Needless to say, there was no real discussion, just a little wordsmithing of the proximity requirement (finally arbitrarily set at 40 miles). The GWO and I were the only ones to address the necessity (or lack thereof) for such an amendment in the first place; all we got in return was question-begging and silence.

So after pulling teeth to get assistance from the president (a practicing lawyer himself) to help me formulate the formal call for votes, I completed my draught last night. This required consulting the bylaws to determine the number of votes needed to approve additions and changes. Turns out, it's even higher than I thought: ¾ instead of ⅔. Well, I already know that the measure isn't supported by anyone on the board and that together we account for 40% of the ownership. So even if the threshold were ⅔ instead of ¾ and everyone else in the association voted unanimously in favour, it would still fail.

If there's any point to this whole farce, I guess it's as a referendum on the board. So far, no real surprises there: Those owners who are never around and contribute nothing to the running of the place are all voting in favour. It also confirms pretty much every negative judgment I've leapt to about the Mr Malcontent's utter lack of political savvy. You'd think if someone really wanted to change the bylaws, they'd've read them closely enough to know what it would take and have done some canvassing to make sure they had the required votes. But such a person wouldn't've sat around stupidly at a meeting saying nothing while a vote was taken to prevent him from renting another year in the first place.

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Talking of malcontents, I want your opinion about something. Suppose you just had an unusually hostile annual meeting in which some members seem to be harboring paranoia about more-involved members trying to grab power and do things behind the scenes and so forth. Do you think a blog where Minutes are posted in real time, meeting times are announced way in advance, an open thread is hosted for all meetings for comments and questions etc., and all conceivable documentation is available in one place for perusal would help with that evident feeling of suspicion and disempowerment on the part of some members? Or am I giving the complainers too much credit for actually wanting to know what's going on versus just showing up and yelling about it once a year?

I'm totally willing to start one if it would truly be helpful, and it's not that much trouble with super user-friendly interfaces they've got on free blogging sites now, but it's more trouble than just emailing out the minutes as we've always done in the past. What do you think?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If you couldn't guess already from the cynicism oozing between every paragraph of my condo rants, I'm gonna say you're giving them far too much credit. You just had a board election--where were the malcontents then?

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Refusing the (possibly sarcastic) nominations of other members before the voting. No, really, THAT HAPPENED.

They did both claim that they would come to sub-committee meetings on the issue they were concerned about, but we'll see. Frankly the issue is taking too long to begin with (the board began talking about it nearly four years ago, and still no end in sight) so I'm actually hoping they were lying about that as I doubt they're interested in doing anything but obstructing progress.

Would blogging about the issue give them a plausible self-excuse for why they don't need to show up in person, I wonder?