Success
members who are in denial of the situation and won’t raise assessments. Even if the board members wanted to raise the assessments, in this recipe there is a crock pot filled with pressure from a small group of unit owners who are opposed to any such increase. And with board members being a group of volunteers, they all too often don’t have the “stomach” to get into a confrontation with an angry crowd; even if it is for the cause of keeping the budget nice and tasty with good financial ingredients. Now as we start to mix in all that is in our imaginary bowl, we discover there is one ingredient that is still missing. It’s a tablespoon of the local city or village which has now “tagged” the property and is threatening to take the association board to court and have the unit owners moved out until the repairs are made. What little money the association had left in the reserve fund is now going to pay for attorneys to defend the association in court… and now we end up with a finely mixed bowl of “disaster cake” ready to be placed in the oven and smell up the kitchen.
By CAI staff writer
While the first recipe may be rarer in community association living, it does happen. I’ve witnessed it over the years in my work with unit owners, board members and property managers. The second recipe however, happens all too often in associations throughout the Chicagoland area: both professionally managed and self-managed communities, regardless of whether it’s a suburban condominium building, one located in the city of Chicago or perhaps a sprawling townhome association in a distant suburb. The lack of using the right “recipe” to make repairs and create a responsible financial plan can end up becoming not just a bad recipe, it can be costly and perhaps life-altering for the unit owners. It doesn’t need to be the collapse of a building on a distant coastal beach with the tragic loss of innocent lives for a bad recipe to be a very serious matter. Many a lender has been on the receiving end of a desperate phone call from a property manager or a board member detailing the complexities and expense of a single major repair or multiple repairs in need of being completed “yesterday” or
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