Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Daily management and CC&R's

[Rob Sandelin (Exchange) (Robsan]

John asked about daily management of your units.

DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT ever put anything about the daily management of 
your operation into the CC&R's. This is NOT the place for such stuff. 
You can create endless house rules to cover all this stuff, and beleive 
me, the banks do not need to know this stuff unless it effects the 
value of the unit. Even then, tell them as little as possible about how 
you do things. It is NONE of their business, and sticking it in the 
CC&R's may very well get your mortgage requests and future resale 
requests rejected. Your CC&R's should be absolutely vanilla - don't 
mention consensus, community meals, or anything else. On this paper you 
want to be a CONDO, simple, staight forward, etc.  2 years after you 
move in, and someone wants to sell, the primary paper the banks will 
look at for a mortgage is the CC&R's.  You may have a great 
understanding with a particular bank right now, but when someone sells, 
it is to your advantage to have any bank write a mortgage for a selling 
unit. You don't want to have to explain all this stuff in your CC&R's 
that is out of the ordinary.  Use internal bylaws for the homeowners 
association to document your decision making, dinner patrol, kids 
helmet rules, whatever. And then keep those to yourself, as they only 
apply to you. Or bettet yet, create boiler plate bylaws for the 
association and keep internal rules on a separate document, refered to 
by date they were adopted.

Related to all this, you will need to keep copies of all the minutes of 
every meeting that is held once you have mortagages.  The banks have a 
legal right to access these and you can get into considerable problems 
should you not have them. In my state, the law says we have to keep 5 
years worth of minutes in the association files. I was told by a condo 
attorney that all states have this in their condo acts, although the 
length of record keeping varies.

As far as daily management decision making goes, one thing we have done 
is to create a system called the decision board, and anyone can post a 
decision form on the board for a small group decision to be made. The 
decision board is a bulletin board in the commonhouse that uses bright 
pink forms to announce upcoming small group decision meetings. Whomever 
shows up at the meeting makes the decision and owns it.=20

 The rules are: 1.) decision has to meet guidelines for appropriate 
small group control - which are listed on the decision board, 2.) it 
has to be posted 5 days in advance so people will know about it, 3.) 
people can write their comments on the decision form if they wish, 4.) 
when the decision meeting is held the decision is written on the back 
of the form so the rest of us know what they did.

This system has worked for us to punt the small stuff, like what are 
going to plant in the garden, to the folks who are interested, sparing 
those that are not interested endless community meeting time devoted to 
such.=20

Rob Sandelin=20
Sharingwood