The different types of board meetings

A meeting of the owners, not of the board, held once a year. This is where directors are elected and where the board reports to the membership. The budget is often ratified here as well.

Quorum and proxies

The bylaws set a quorum — a minimum share of the ownership that must be represented for business to be transacted. Falling short is common, which is why proxies matter: an owner who cannot attend can authorise someone else to be counted and to vote. Returning a proxy is the single most useful thing an owner who cannot attend can do.

The board’s working meeting, held on whatever cycle the bylaws or the board sets — monthly and quarterly are both common. Ordinary business: financials, maintenance, vendor contracts, correspondence, committee reports, architectural requests.

Owners may attend

Owners generally have the right to attend, subject to the executive session exceptions below. Attending is not the same as participating: most boards set aside an open forum for owner comment and then conduct the rest of the meeting themselves. That is not owners being shut out; it is how a meeting of five people gets through an agenda.

Called between regular meetings for a specific purpose — a bid that cannot wait, an insurance claim, a proposed special assessment. Notice must state the purpose, and business outside that purpose generally cannot be transacted.

A special meeting of the owners can usually be called by the board, and also by the owners themselves on a petition of the percentage the bylaws specify.

For a genuine emergency — a burst main, a fire, a structural failure — where waiting for notice would cause harm. The notice requirements are relaxed, and the board should ratify the emergency action at its next regular meeting and record it in the minutes.

The category is narrow. A deadline the board created by leaving something late is not an emergency.

A closed portion of a board meeting, from which owners are excluded. It exists for a defined and short list of subjects — typically legal advice from the association’s attorney, personnel matters, enforcement or delinquency involving a specific owner, and matters where open discussion would prejudice the association’s position.

What it is not for

Executive session is not a way to take an unpopular decision out of sight. The board should announce the general subject before going into session, take the substantive vote in the open portion where the law requires it, and record in the minutes that a session was held and why.

• Notice periods and delivery methods are set by the bylaws and by statute. Getting them wrong can invalidate what the meeting decided.
• Minutes record what was decided, not what was said. They should show the motion, who moved it, and the result.
• Minutes are association records and are available to owners, subject to the usual exceptions — executive session minutes are commonly withheld or redacted.
• Draft minutes are not the record until the board approves them at a subsequent meeting.