It’s that time of year again when we are coming to the end of the school holidays and Australia Day is upon us.
On top of all that, we are hunting for Covid test kits and trying to anticipate which supermarket shelf won’t be restocked next.
But the Flat Chat Forum rolls on and this week we return to one of the great perennial questions – should we pay strata committee members for their work?
This always brings out an interesting discussion with views coming from all directions, including that the best of them do a lot of work that benefits the community, so they should be rewarded.
However, there’s another opinion that payments will attract the wrong type of people for the wrong reasons. And, it could encourage a sense of entitlement among those who benefit from it and an exaggerated sense of grievance from owners who disagree with their decisions.
Here at Flat Chat we think strata committee members should be allowed to be paid but only after they have completed an accredited course in strata law and management, but still at the discretion of the owners corporation.
What do you think? Have your say HERE.
Another running discussion concerns updated fire safety checks, especially those that have been allowed to be a bit slack in the past.
If a new committee gets a new firm to do the checks and they discover that there’s a lot of work that should have been done years before, can the current committee penalise the previous owners for passing the costs down the years to today?
Good luck with that, we say. You have your two-cents worth HERE.
Finally, here’s one we’ve never had before, from an owner in a two-lot strata scheme with limited shared common property.
He wants to install a new swimming pool and wonders if it might qualify as a “complying development” and if he needs any other permission.
The answer is probably yes to both, but he still has a couple of hoops to jump through. You can find out what HERE.
These are just the newest topics on the Form and there are a lot of ongoing discussions that may have moved on since you last looked. Check them out.
How to ask and answer questions
Anyone can read our posts any time but now there are several easy ways you can search, access, ask questions and reply to others’ queries.
The best way these days may be to click on “Forum: Your Qs & A’s” on the top menu bar on a computer screen or on the drop-down menu (three lines) on the right of the screen on phones and tablets, under the Strata Choice ad. Then click on the topic title that interests you, and off you go.
Alternatively, you can look at the list of “Your latest questions and answers” under the ads on the right of the page on a computer screen. Or at the bottom, after the ads and stories, on a tablet or phone.
Or you can go “old school” and go to the Forum Home Page and work your way through the topics there.
Whichever route you take to get there, the best way to keep up to speed with what’s happening is to register (if you haven’t already done so), then login and subscribe for free to the topics that interest you most.
That way you’ll get an alert whenever the discussion moves forward, and you can also chip in with your own comments and questions. Have a look HERE at our instant guide to getting online.
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