Buildings in the mountains take a lot of abuse especially from winter weather. You can’t defer maintenance that you might get away with in milder climates. That is one reason we bought a condo in Mammoth so clearing the snow, and fixing leaks, etc would be a group responsibility, not just ours. It seemed like a wise decision at the time.
However, repairs and maintenance for buildings from 1972 are not trivial. Beside age, there have been many upgrades required by new building codes, insurance mandates and snow damage that are going to take a lot of money to address. Lucky for us, State Farm Insurance actually paid out on the serious damage to our roofs and balconies from the terrible winter of 22/23. And, they didn’t cancel our policy. However, they won’t pay for the new balcony upgrades required because of some balcony that fell off a building in San Francisco.
As I sat for 3 hours in our annual HOA meeting for our condo association, I marveled at democracy at work. Our elected board had spent hundreds or thousands of hours working with contractors, assessing options, coming up with priorities and making recommendations on what just had to be repaired this year. It is going to be expensive. We spent a lot of time discussing the special assessment that will be required for deck and stair repairs, foundation work and other stuff that we actually need to do this year if we don’t want to pay a lot more money to fix it later.
There were questions and pushback followed by clear responses with adequate data to satisfy the homeowners. We voted to move forward and assess ourselves the substantial sums to take care of our mutual property. It worked because we had a common interest. It worked because we trust the integrity and honesty of our board. Do we want to shell out all this money? No. Will we do it? Yes. And our community will be better for it. Truly, it was a shining example of good leadership and democracy at work. And, I thought it was going to be a boring HOA meeting!
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