What If You Could Make Your Annual Condo/HOA Meeting Quorum Whoever Shows?
HOAleader.com - Tip of the Week - March 8, 2024
In this week's tip, we discuss a fantastic idea for solving your quorum problems—and its huge drawback.
Quorums are, to put it politely, a challenge. So what if you just decided that your quorum for your members' meeting was whatever number of people showed up to your meeting?
For instance, let's say you have a 250-unit condo. If 50 members attend your meeting after your board does all the right things to draw attendance, could 26 votes be permissible to approve whatever is on your agenda that needs owners' approval?
The short answer: In some states, you could indeed amend your documents to say that. But it may be dangerous to make that change.
In some states, the law already tells
boards how low they can go with a quorum. Tennessee is one of those states.
"Under Tennessee's nonprofit corporations act, which covers most HOAs, the minimum quorum is 10 percent," reports Scott D. Weiss, CCAL, a partner and the Tennessee
office chair at Kaman & Cusimano in Nashville, Tenn., who represents more than 800 condos/HOA communities throughout the state.
"That's pretty low," he says. "Developers will often set quorum at 50 percent. That may be fine if your
community is small, but not if you have a 6,000-home HOA.
"So when I draft an amendment to the bylaws, I'll set the quorum at something like 30 percent," explains Weiss. "I'll also add a mechanism that says that all the members present can
adjourn and the meeting can be recalled without notice other than an announcement at the meeting. At that recalled meeting, they then need half of 30 percent to meet the quorum. If they can't reach that number, then they can recall again that same night, and the number shifts to 10 percent.
"If you can't meet that 10 percent quorum, you're out of luck," he adds.