Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Request: Operating Agreements

[Margaret Weatherly (martiew]

In Liberty Village where we developed our own community, early members
receive a lower lot cost. As milestones were reached and time goes on,
the lot cost rises. This rewards the early "pioneers". 

The development is being done by an Limited Liability Partnership which
accepted investment from the "pioneers" and anyone else who wanted to
invest. Under those Bylaws, the money will be returned with interest
after a certain point in the project.

We then set up a community association which everyone belongs to. There
are members of the community who are not investors, and investors who
are not members. The community association has its own set of Articles
of Incorporation, Bylaws and covenants from the State of Maryland. 

Those documents are very traditional and only mention consensus once,
and we even debated if we should do that since it scares bankers. They
are broad legal statements and are not our operating agreements.

After writing our legal documents, we wrote a vision and mission
statement which is what we are all about, and a participation agreement
which is more specific. And then we have operating agreements. All these
are totally internal. 

Operating agreements can change and deal with very specific issues such
as decision making, pets, job descriptions of teams, children, etc. 

 You don't want to have to change your legal documents with your
government everytime you come to a decision. 

Hope that helps. It has been a long and winding road and I love my home
and my community. 

Martie Weatherly, Liberty Village, Frederick, MD

"Robert P. Arjet" wrote:
> 
> Hello, all:
> 
> Here at Central Austin Cohousing, we are looking at the thorny issue of
> re-writing our Operating Agreement.  We're hoping not to have to totally
> re-invent the wheel, so I was wondering if there are any groups out there
> that would be willing to share their operating agreements, by-laws, or
> whatever passes for the legally binding statement of how you get things
> done in your jurisdiction.  Specific issues that we are wrestling with are
> how to legally describe consensus, and how to handle investment in the
> project by members prior to the project getting built.
> 
> On that second point, we're hoping to get a lot of our capital from
> members, and would like to reward that early, high-risk investment by
> substantially reducing unit costs for early investors.  Has anyone written
> anything like that into an operating agreement?
> 
> I would be glad to catalog and make available any and all documents I
> receive, so that we could have a library of operating agreements, by-laws,
> etc.  I went through the archives, but the only ones I found were from
> Martha's Vineyard Cohousing (Thanks very much to those folk for posting
> them on-line).
> 
> Can anyone out there help us out?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robert Arjet
> Central Austin Cohousing
> www.io.com/~weaver
> 
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