Annual Meeting minutes, Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Topics: Budget, management elections
Time & venue: 7:00- p.m., common house sitting room and online
Present:
Michael Abrahamson, Jorge San Pedro, Robin San Pedro, Cheryl Keil, Steven Chodoriwsky, Hannah Kum, Stephen Smart, Kerry Terrazas, Ben Trueman, Lynda Angelastro, Tobi Werkhausen, Alex Parvaz, Laraine, Miner, Emily _, Michael Wason, Vicky Wason, Laura deBacker, Scott Price, Linda Reed, Chelsea Erhart, Kay Argyle (notes), Vincent Mazzione (online), Kerry Jo Finney (online), Joseph Sweeney, Eliza Perkins
Q. Is there no budget for planting trees? A. It's included in the Landscaping budget. Planning drought-tolerant water-thrifty shrubs and trees with drip irrigation, but locations are not firm yet. Q. Instead of $5K for tree work, can't we break it into $4K for tree work and $1K for planting? Want a separate line item for tree planting. A. If you want input please go to Landscaping. There is $500 list in the descriptions of budget requests. A. It's too late to go to Landscaping. Q. The community consensed 9/13/2023 that Landscaping/the Tree Committee would make tree-specific decisions, in order to empower the committee to make progress instead of using community meetings for . Landscape advertised meetings and asked for community input on their budget and none of this is set in stone. Landscape does not have any trees scheduled to be cut down. A. Given the historical record on this, don't have faith that the community will plant trees. Q. The budget line under committees has zero of tree planting. A. That was a discretionary-spending committee, which doesn't currently exist as a separate committee. The money got moved up to non-discretionary landscaping.
Q. Why are bank fees so high? A. QuickBooks charges a 1% fee for ACH deposits. It's been the case for years but hasn't always been under an accurate budget category. The line under "bookkeeping software and support" is just the QuickBooks subscription.
Q. What's the amount under "receivables" on the actuals sheet? A. Jorge will research what it is and figure out if it needs to be written off.
We had a lot of maintenance work in 2024, $4800 fixing gutters and decks, more than 2023. We anticipate $41,500 for a furnace, crack-filling asphalt, and repairing stucco. This is just things we already know need doing, and doesn't include contingencies (surprises). By better management of the reserve we earned $7K this year. (Go, Jorge!)
Q. Are large expenses like repairing the stucco decided just by Management or does it go to the community for decisions? A. Responsibility is currently split between Management and Maintenance. By law, Management is responsible for maintenance, but delegates some work to the Maintenance committee, i.e., research on what needs to be done, options for materials & methods, research on suppliers and contractors, supervision, etc. Don't get too scared about Management being responsible; we have insurance specifically for things Management might do wrong.
Q. Have we had any formal proposals this year? A. Not that anybody can think of.
Legally we need 67% approval, but because of who we are we try initially to get consensus. For a quorum, we need 18 units represented, including the proxies. We have twenty units.
The budget passes. Two stand-asides. Chelsea doesn't feel she understands everything well enough yet and would like to see the bank fees reduced. Mike W is concerned that we are moving away from being a consensus-based community