Is our Market Street at
Town Center Condominium Board of Directors attempting to hinder communication among unit owners?
Our Board of Directors
recently sent all unit owners a letter that includes this unfortunate statement:
“...no
request has been made and/or granted for use of the Association’s Community
Room on that date and time.”
That Board of Directors
letter, which was dated July 9, 2015, was responding to an anonymous letter
that invited all Market Street at Town Center Condominium unit owners to a
meeting in the Community Room at 7 p.m. Wednesday, 15 July, to discuss the
effects of the lease-cap amendment ratified in April 2014. (I provided comments relevant to both letters
in my recent post of 10 July.) Because I think
communication is good, I approve of the sending of both letters, but, for
reasons I'll discuss in the following paragraphs, I think our Board of Directors should have omitted the "unfortunate statement" I
quoted above from its letter.
Residents don’t need
approval to use the Community Room so long as the number of non-residents
attending is no more than four times the number of units represented at the
meeting by residents. For example, if residents from five different units
attend a meeting, each of those units is allowed four non-resident guests, so
there could be a total of 20 non-resident guests in addition to all the
residents of those five units.
In 2007, our Board of
Directors published "GUIDELINES FOR USE OF THE COMMUNITY ROOM." Note especially rules 1 and
4. (It seems a little odd to me that
tenants have the same right to use the room as resident owners, but
non-resident owners must be a “guest” to use the room!) Please also note that the Guidelines say
nothing about requesting use of the Community Room; the Guidelines make clear
that residents--without requesting approval--may use the Room within the
designated hours anytime their use doesn't interfere with official Unit Owners'
Association functions (which, in my experience, have always been scheduled at
least several days before they occurred).
While the "unfortunate
statement" quoted above is true, it is irrelevant, so the question arises: Why did our Board of Directors include that "unfortunate statement" in its letter? I can think of only two possible
explanations: (a) The Board mistakenly
thought approval was required to use the Room for such a meeting, or (b) the
Board was wrongfully trying to make it more difficult to hold such a
meeting. It is unfortunate if either (a)
or (b) applies to any Director we unit owners have elected.
