Finance & Legal minutes: 2017-11-07

Minutes:

GO Finance & Legal Committee
Minutes of 11-7-17 Meeting

Present: Becky G., Becky H., Rod, Amy

1. Insurance

• Treehouse insurance – options other than via Goodman Venegas?
“Specialty insurance” covers unusual situations like this. Rod has a list
of vendors that might be able to deal with something like the Treehouse. He
will try to get info before the Nov. 20 budget meeting, but can’t be sure
of it. Syndallas had suggested CIG; this company is on Rod’s list to check
on.

• Association policy: Request from Buildings to investigate the relative
cost of a lower deductible vs. paying for repairs that cost less than
$5,000 per occurrence. Rod will look into this. $2,000 had been mentioned
as an example. We noted that this is a request for information, not a
request to make the change.

• Other insurance topics? Rod reviewed our policy and thinks that
there’s no coverage for the garage buildings in it. This is surprising
because as Becky G. pointed out, our application clearly had all three
garage buildings. There’s another mistake that’s a typo with the unit
numbers. It’s great that Rod is checking so carefully. He will follow up
with George. Rod thinks that someone else should look over the policy as
well. We noted that for some time, Syndallas has been recommending that we
develop multiple insurance-savvy members. Our concern is that we don’t
know who would volunteer to do this.

• Ditto for Truck – the truck policy is written by Travelers. Rod will
try to get an answer to this question. We do have an umbrella policy as
well.

• Rod is not sure he will be able to continue in his role as insurance
“guru,” so we will need to think about alternative scenarios.

• Becky received an updated list of authorized drivers from Tiffany at
Goodman Venegas. She will put it in the notebook after Rod puts in the
office.

2. Budget process

• Truck usage - did we agree to stop charging individuals for truck
usage? This came up at the last community meeting. No official decision
has been made, but no one has been doing the paperwork since Keith Garbutt
left F&L and no one has picked it up. Does the community want us to
continue to collect this income? One idea is that there would be a flat fee
per use and this would get “baked into” the registration system. For this
year, we recommend that we budget for $0, and if Grounds decides they still
want to collect, it’s up to Grounds together with F&L to figure out the
how. Might involve Tech. Currently, way more labor is involved than the
money we collect for it. Recommend leaving it at $0 until G & F&L work it
out.

3. Bookkeeping

a. Updates – DTE has really screwed up our billing but we are back on track
for 2018. F&L recommends that we don’t backtrack to try to break out the
separate monthly usage the way we normally do. The totals are now accurate,
and in the new year we’ll resume our pattern of breaking out the monthly
usage components.

b. Arrears
• We received a request to reimburse a household’s late fees. We noted that
late fees would be voided off the account and would show up as a credit; we
would not write a check. We would only write a check if the household had
paid ahead and had a credit balance. We directed bookkeeper Becky G. to
waive $75 (three months of late fees, half of the total).

• We are planning to contact our attorney to place lien on a household that
is over $1000 in arrears if they don’t get their arrears under $1000 by
Nov. 12. Becky H. sent them a message, but hasn’t heard anything back.

• Another household will be over $1,000 at the end of this month if they
don’t pay in November. We have not received a check from them since
September 15, but there were already some arrears at that point. Becky H.
will let the household know that if we don’t receive enough funds to bring
the arrears below $1000 by Dec. 1, we will ask our attorney to start the
process of placing a lien.

c. Tech Committee is trying to put together a budget. One of the balls in
the air is that Elph asked Comcast to raise our bandwidth for an extra
$100/mo. Rod went back through the statements that Becky G. recently sent
Tech, but didn’t see this new charge. Becky explained that she hasn’t
updated the bank auto-pay records in Quickbooks recently, so that’s why it
didn’t show up.

• Melisa depends on us to provide a phone line for her office. It costs us
about $250/mo. Tech wants to reduce this expenditure and is working with
Melisa on this.

• It will cost about $6,000 to replace our wireless. Tech has gotten a new
provider and increased the bandwidth with Comcast. These improvements have
been helpful but Tech Com wants to do more work. They have $5,000 in the
bank and have been spending it on these improvements. They’d like to start
paying into their savings account again. Becky G. explained that they
should add a line to the Tech budget line to start adding to the savings
line. Current cap is $6225 for Tech savings. Becky thought that Elph
requested to raise the cap at the first budget meeting, but it wasn’t in
the minutes.

4. Master Deed & Bylaws Changes – no news; Debbi was not able to attend
today

5. Other Business

a. When broken agreements lead to liability concerns (Debbi) – no news

b. F&L calendar of routine tasks (Sharon) – no news

c. Truck Proposal – waiting for time on community agenda when Amy is not
facilitating.
d. Anything else?

6. Next Meeting: Wednesday, November 29

Cooler doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_dmnNJmHmrwwFIfnscnRbPK-_8_kmahfFsOTn_fEvTY/edit
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