Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Who gets to vote?

[Becky Schaller (bschaller]

Robin, in our group, we have one vote per household.  
We have not yet started construction so we don't yet have any renters. 
But I suspect that renters will be involved in day to day decisions 
like how many days a week we will have dinner together.  But not about 
decisions concerning roof repairs for the common house.
We also have a provision about what to do if we can't reach consensus.  
I think it's important to have some criteria for when it's ok to go to 
a 75% majority (we have 80%) and when the group simply needs to 
continue talking.  Otherwise why not just say all decisions are made 
by a supermajority.  If you want our details, I can copy them for you.
In our group Associates can not block consensus or vote when we go a 
supermajority or what we call second level decision making.

Becky Schaller
TNDC Cohousing
Tucson,  AZ
We have just less than 5 acres of land optioned.  We have our site 
planned; we're designing our common houe this weekend and we are 
looking for members.   We are centrally located, near the University 
of Arizona, near bus routes and bike routes.



Robin Allison wrote:
> 
> Our group is in the process of writing an Organising Agreement and we
> are trying to work out the finer detail of how we make decisions. Of
> course we will be using consensus and hope to decide most issues in this
> way, but we will revert to 75% majority vote where agreement can't
> otherwise be made.
> 
> The question is, does this generally mean one vote per (full member)
> household, or one vote per adult (there may be 2 or 3 adults in a
> household)? And what about Associate Members? I've looked through the
> archives and it seems that generally renters don't get to have this
> final say in decision-making, but I can't find reference to how other
> groups have handled this issue of just how this final voting thing
> happens.
> 
> We're probably going to finalise this on Wednesday so I'd really
> appreciate hearing how other groups do it before then. Thanks!
> 
> Robin Allison
> Waitakere Eco-Neighbourhood Cohousing Project
> Auckland, New Zealand.
> Where we've started having common dinners (before our meetings) even
> though we haven't bought land yet!