HOAleader.com - Tip of the Week - February 12, 2021
Published: Fri, 02/12/21
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What to Know Before Muting Someone in a Virtual Condo/HOA Meeting
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We've all been there in a meeting, where we grumble in our head: Is there a mute button on this guy?
And now, with the invasion of virtual meetings, we have that mute button! Hooray.
In this week's tip, we offer tips on how to use that feature with restraint.
"This is one of the wild things—aside from commuting being a thing of the past—in this lockdown," says Wil Washington, founder of Chadwick, Washington, Moriarty, Elmore & Bunn in Fairfax, Va., who is licensed in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland and has been practicing community association law for more than three decades. "Having virtual meetings is great because you do have that mute capacity. But there are people who can get around it if they work really hard at it."
Many boards seem to have settled into a process for meetings, and that includes muting to ensure there's no confusion or chaos. "In the meetings I've been in, generally people are muted until it's their time to speak, just from a background-noise perspective," reports Joan Lewis-Heard, a senior associate at SwedelsonGottlieb in Los Angeles, who at any given time represents hundreds of condos and HOAs throughout California.
"The board members would be unmuted in the regular course of the board business," she says. "And the general public would be muted until, for instance, the homeowners' forum. Then you'd be unmuting Jenny or whomever because said she had questions. Typically, those people are unmuted one at a time so you don't get a whole lot of background noise from the gardeners, garbage pickup, and kids asking what's for dinner.
"The idea isn't to censor what anyone is saying unless they're cursing up a storm, trying to incite a riot, or going overboard," says Lewis-Heard. "That's a judgment call. Just like you can't shout fire in crowded theater, you can't get unruly or disruptive in a board meeting."
As in many other cases, this is a situation that practically screams for a policy or procedure. "You can mute attendees, but I think it's important to lay the ground rules," states Molly Peacock, counsel at Rees Broome in Tysons Corner, Va., who has represented condos and HOAs for 15 years.
Get tips for crafting one, along with dialogue you might use to offer fair warning before muting someone, in our new article: https://www.hoaleader.com/members/4273.cfm
Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President
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