This week will be punctuated, Thursday night, by one of the least pleasant things I’ve done in my adult life: chairing the annual meeting of our full townhouse association. I’ve been dreading this event for several months, ever since those of us on the board began preparing to resolve some mounting problems that are or will soon plague us. Unfortunately, these solutions require raising the monthly dues that each owner must pay to the association – a step that has already generated a lot of invective and opposition from some members of the community.
The first change is perhaps the most radical and important: contracting with a property-management company to handle our bookkeeping, vendor contracting, and other tasks that the board has been handling on its own but which have been extremely hard to shoehorn into lives that are full of other obligations. Though the contract is not cheap, neither is it onerously expensive, especially when weighed against both the efficiencies of having professionals handle the more bureaucratic aspects of the association and the fact that each member of the board members has to do than than he should: we simply can’t find enough people to fill all five seats on the board. In my two years on the board for two years now, I’ve seen two board members quit after getting frustrated by their duties (and by a particularly obstreperous association resident), and had no end of trouble trying to find people willing to serve on the board. Right now, with exactly 48 hours until the meeting, we still can’t find anybody willing to be nominated for the fifth seat on the board: everyone knows that serving is a pain in the neck. These facts notwithstanding, some members of the board are intractably opposed to the use of a management company and naively certain that we can continue to rely on the already broken machinery of a volunteer board.
The shift of many responsibilities from the board alone to the board and the management company precedes by an expected springtime hike in our association’s insurance rates. This is where some real costs will come in, and where our dues increase is most needed. But as with the management-company situation, this is another place where the the naive think that we can just switch our policy to a new company, saving a few thousand dollars per year for the association (and a few hundred bucks per household) while also incurring considerable time-and-energy costs for board members, who would have to do all the hard work of seeking and evaluating bids for our policy, vetting possible insurers, doing all the changeover paperwork – and possibly still having to raise the dues to cover a premium that could well be higher than our current one.
God, my head hurts just contemplating it.
And but so, the annual meeting will almost certainly feature vociferous criticism from some people -and one person in particular – who think they know better than the board but who are unwilling or unable to actually join the board and do the work – even as they’re also unwilling to pay higher dues.
This is a pretty doomy scenario, at least for someone like me, inclined to ratiocination and averse to confrontation. But I’ve been surprised by how placid I’ve been in my angst. I’ve fallen back on all kinds of work habits which have helped dampen my sense of worry: breaking down tasks into discrete components; reminding myself that this is a temporary situation; seeking help from others; finding viable Plans B, C, and D; and using writing as a tool for thinking. With any luck, all the unpacking the doom will pay off with a better-than-expected meeting on Thursday.
