Finance & Legal minutes: 2005-01-16

Minutes:

MONKEY: Willie will call Barb Young to see if she anticipates insurance rates going up next year. MONKEY: Willie will rewrite the CIC proposal, send a draft to F&L for further comments before we bring it back to the next community meeting in early Feb. MONKEY: Willie will write up a job description to send out to community of the finops convener. MONKEY: Willie will talk with work cmty to recruit a finops convener, and award more hours to the book-keeper. We should assign work hours for a tax-liason. MONKEY: We need to schedule a book-keeper's meeting over email. (patti, elph, dale, willie, kathy b)


Construction project wrap-up

Alicia presented to us the condensed

We should add in how the contingency was spent by the various committee line-items. Some slight wording changes were proposed, we also discussed what the various numbers meant. She said that she'll add some pie-charts, and some footnotes before the meeting tomorrow.

We should include the full number report as an appendix.

How should we respond to questions of how / when the overspent amount will be paid back?

We could raise association fees, hold a fundraiser, or find the money in other places. We've collected nearly $14k more than we've paid on water fees, we may also have some surplus left over from last year.

Also - we may have some luck with negotiating a better rate on the water tap fee, but we can't say how much money we may get back from this.


Scio tap fee

JD spoke with Doug Louaine (sp?), and he said that what we're saying makes sense. JD will speak with Spaulding Clark, (the former township supervisor who's been hired on as a consultant to retain some history) about what actually happened, and what may happen in the future.

There are 3 items that may change.

- one-time tap fee may drop from 33k to about 14k. - the adjustment in the REU for the common house would drop our bills dramatically. - separately, the individual units are messed up. Each building is being billed as a unit, but each unit should be billed. We have been collecting enough money to cover this, and we won't "feel" the hit.

The township charges a really high minimum.


Which budget do we charge the Rice cooker from?

The CH overspent in 2004, so there isn't any room to add a rice cooker to that budget. It makes good sense to charge things where / when they happen, it keeps things cleaner.


How much should we spend on insurance deductible?

There is no deductible for liability, $1k for property. We don't have the expertise, nor are we spending our time thinking about what could break, etc.

Is the building's "$1k for breakage", their expectation for a deductible line item?

We recommend that buildings and grounds should determine how much they want to spend for deductible items.

What's the process for this? Do we take it on this year, or ask them to bring forth adjustment proposals? Can we ask BARC for an exception to move it? The next meeting is only 24 hours away, how do we come up with the right amounts?

This money could be spent from steering's contingency, and possibly even F&L's discretionary fund.

People would probably feel more comfortable about spending more money on association fees after an incident occurs.

To steering: next year, buildings should consider whether they want to budget some money for deductibles. Although, what happens if a vehicle plows through a house, or a garage?

If we didn't have the money, we'd re-arrange our spending to cover something like this. If we use up the steering emergency fund, and (if the CIC passes and we use up the discretionary) then we would re-arrange the budget at that time, "slash and burn".

We propose that buildings add a $0 line item for insurance deductible for this year as a place-holder so that we remember to discuss it in the future.


How much will insurance rates increase & when?

Late July, for inflation of what's covered:

We won't know this until late July. It went up by about $500 last year, and we only need to pay for half of the year, so we'll ask for an additional $250.

CH should be notified about businesses' liability not being covered.

MONKEY: Willie will call Barb Young to see if she anticipates insurance rates going up next year.


the CIC proposal:

We're going to scale back, if not withdraw the committee's internal line items restriction. If something is wildly overspent, it should be brought to other people's attention, so that other crucial items aren't overspent.

Some internal items are less crucial than others. Some items certainly should never be cut, but others are less vital.

MONKEY: Willie will rewrite the proposal, send a draft to F&L for further comments before we bring it back to the next community meeting in early Feb.


Restructing F&L:

We talked about a summary of how we'd like to split off a financial operations group from the policy & theory group.

MONKEY: Willie will write up a job description to send out to community of the finops convener.

MONKEY: Willie will talk with work cmty to recruit a finops convener, and award more hours to the book-keeper. We should assign work hours for a tax-liason.


Reviewing the books

Patti thinks that we may have this wrapped-up by mid Feburary. We probably overspent, but

What does "closing the books" mean? - Balancing out the checkbook when the statement comes... - Being able to report on it - If this is closing out the budget, there will need to be several heads looking at this - Some of Dale's 6 month review items should be looked at. Some of these were 18, 12, or 6 months worth.

At the end of the year, we should report on: - association budget - loan - project - LTCRF - water & sewer for units - overall cash flow

How do we get enough labor to close the books?

MONKEY: We need to schedule a book-keeper's meeting over email. (patti, elph, dale, willie, kathy b)


Next meeting:

Sunday, the 23rd at Dale's from 4-6pm.