Did You Notice Something New?
Preparation Required Now for 2023 Notice Delivery: How SB 392 Changes Notice Delivery (Again!)
Sandra L. Gottlieb, Esq., CCAL SwedelsonGottlieb
Before you send out your fiscal year-end annual policy statement and annual budget report, you’ll need to know about new changes to California law regarding preparation and mailing requirements.
Starting January 1, 2022, associations must begin soliciting their members’ preferred delivery methods (either email, mail, or both) and provide notice to members that they are not required to provide their email address to the association (Civil Code § 4041). This information must be solicited from the membership annually with enough time to allow the association to update the addresses in its membership list no later than 30 days prior to mailing the annual budget reports. It also requires the association to solicit this information and provide “a simple manner for the member to inform the association in writing that the member wishes to change their preferred delivery method.” Your attorney may suggest adding a checklist of options in the notice that requests the owner’s preferred delivery options.
Now that you have all of this information, what are you going to do with it? Well, the change to Civil Code § 5230(c) makes it unlawful for the association or management to sell membership information without permission from the member. So, if you’re interested in selling this information, you might as well put a request box on the notice seeking member information by having the member opt-in, so to say, in having their information sold.
Good luck with that, by the way. You never know, it may be a good revenue stream for an association – if, for example, local real estate agents would be interested in purchasing the information. That said, for me, this comes under the heading of “Just because you can does not mean you should.”
And, once you’ve gathered this information in 2022, the new law requires that beginning January 1, 2023, an association must deliver documents requiring individual notice to members in the manner they have selected as their preferred method of delivery, or if no method is selected, by traditional mail (Civil Code § 4040). That means that management companies are going to need to have databases that allow for tracking this information and using it when handling mailings. Start working with your software providers now!
Members should be encouraged to accept receipt of notices and communications from the association via email. It will make things simpler for the association and management and will allow the owners to access the information with ease. If the members fail to respond to this request, the association may use the last address provided by the member, or if none, the property address within the association. Add these items to the checklist. Did the owner respond or not? What was the default address?
18 March | April 2022
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