The annual general meeting of the strata council for my apartment is usually held every year in May. Going to these meetings is a necessary evil of being a homeowner in a multi-dwelling building. It’s a boring time, you sometimes come to lose respect for some of your fellow homeowners, and in the end, you just find out how much more you’ll be paying in strata fees.
Normally, a package containing info about the meeting and what resolutions we’re gonna vote on in the meeting arrives in the mail several weeks beforehand. On the day of the meeting, everyone goes to the meeting in the common room on our ninth floor. Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess why this year we won’t be able to attend this meeting in person.
It’s June now and we haven’t had the meeting yet. In fact, I just found out yesterday what they are doing instead. Sometime later this month, we vote on the resolutions via proxy voting, which is essentially mail-in voting. The AGM materials will still be mailed to us and it might take them several weeks before that happens. To facilitate discussion of strata business and to ask questions, a Zoom meeting will be held sometime this month. I find this to be very interesting as this will be the first time all the owners will have met using online meeting software. Some of the owners are older and I wonder if they’ll be able to setup Zoom and join the meeting successfully. There could be anywhere from 20 to 60 people in this Zoom meeting, so this will need a strong moderator who can wrangle the participants and maintain order.
2020 continues to be a year of many firsts. I will report back on how the meeting goes.