Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Consensus vs. Executive meetings

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Many developed cohousing groups have a board of  directors model, where some
subset of the membership is elected  and acts as legal representative. This
is a common boilerplate condo legal format. In the case of a legal action
against a member (which I am only aware of two such actions in 10 years of
cohousing) the board can simply hold a closed meeting with an attorney.
Legal actions of Cohousing vs. a  member seem very rare so I would not spend
a huge amount of time worrying about it. I am not aware of specific
covenants about closed meetings that cohousing communities have adopted, and
have not personally heard about nor seen any such clauses in the cohousing
documents I have had the chance to review.

Obviously if you create an organization without a discrete board of
directors,  for example, everyone is on the board, then you run into the
problem of how to move ahead when legally encumbered. I think having a
subset of the membership form the board is a smart thing to do. Most groups
seem to do this.

It is common that boards are given specific decision making authority and
this is usually documented in the condo docs. Sometimes banks  can be fussy
and demand this actually, because it ensures that there is some  legally
responsible entity for coming to decisions.

Rob Sandelin

_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.communityforum.net/mailman/listinfo/cohousing-l