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Chris, there seem to be a lot of issues in your statement, but I will address:
” the question I have today is can they assess for repairs – that they
admit should be someone else’s responsibility and have yet to approach
the responsible party? Should we not only be assessed if who we feel is
responsible officially denies responsibility?”It looks to me as if the board is doing the right thing, getting the repairs done. In order to pay for them, a special assessment seems to be needed. That seems to be good, in that the problem will have been resolved by the board, but at the expense of the owners.
There seem to be bigger issues – is there not enough money in the Reserve Fund to pay for the repairs? If not, why not? Are the ‘contributions’ too low for a long term, steady and careful budget? Is there no ‘cushion’ of funds in the operating budget to handle issues like this? Would you rather spend money on legal fees or money on fixing the issues?
Many years ago, I was on the board of our condominium – we were all new to the process. The re-developer had low-balled a lot of issues, done a lot of cosmetic work but the renovations were as deep as the paint – not the infrastructure. We contemplated legal action, but our lawyer advised against doing so – we would spend money on lawyers on both sides of the issues, and at the end we still wouldn’t have fixed the problems. We bit the bullet and worked on fixing the issues; it paid off in the long run.
