Finance & Legal minutes: 2004-04-18

Minutes:

F&L meeting, April 18th, 2004
on Willie's blustery porch
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Attendance: Willie, Dale, Jim G., briefly Adi

Monkey reports:
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Adi has been following up with taxes, JD thinks that the two of them will talk with the township assessor.


MONKEY: Willie will send out the last meeting's minutes.

MONKEY: Dale will ask cohousing-L how other communities have handled the insurance coverage overlap ambiguity, so that we can have some more info for the next meeting.

Jim's proposal is on tomorrow's agenda

MONKEY: Jim shall & will email out his proposal.

MONKEY: Kathy will modify the job description for "recharging for a bounced check" on the Wiki.

Heather & Adi seem to be working out well on meals billing. Adi is ramping up on SQL ledger, and is feeling that his work on the tech billing should benefit the meal program billing procedure. There was some discussion about if these could be combined. They have different bank accounts. Perhaps they could show up on the same invoice.

MONKEY: Kathy & Dale should work together to work on setting up the Clark household's association fees.

MONKEY: Patti will look into whether our system accounts for a bounced check.
fee, and when credit is given, make sure it gets revoked.

MONKEY: Patti will ask for a check to be cut to bring up our balance at Republic to the minimum requirement.

Republic Needs:
We have a Savings ($250) and a Checking ($2500) account. That's what
we are obligated to have. Minimum balance on checking is $2500. It
does not need to be actively used.

MONKEY: Patti should report back to F&L if we have the appropriate balance in our Republic accounts, and if not, rectify it.

MONKEY: Dale will be making copies for tomorrow's proposal.


Rectifying CH & garage construction costs
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People pre-paid toward the CH loan, but we only wrote a check for $10k to CDC. There were 11 households who paid their $5k or so, so we need to pay the other $45k or so. JD should be getting in touch with Patti for details.


Common House & Office Billing
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There is movement forward on the lease front, but none at all on the billing front. The ones responsible for this is the CH cmty.


Master Deed
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JD still says that Sunward & CDC about working out the master deed.
We could also spend the $150 / hour and get this answered from a lawyer ourselves.

Doesn't seem to be a burning issue. It would be a burning issue if we regularly had damage to common property. Our viewpoint is that this is not a current problem. If Sunward is working on this, then great - we can wait for them.


Budget Review Process
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Dale has one hour a month, and would like to start working on getting started. We need to get moving on this.

There is desire to at least start with a spreadsheet with the allocated budget, and if we're on track or not. Many of these things will be dependent on seasons or other timing. The bottom line is that a sub-committee (including Patti) would sit down with the books and create a document that they could present and reccomend changes. They'll ask for more, less, or adjustments, but this would be a review for edits and not a full-blow budget creation process.

Perhaps we should input from committees, we will review the info we have through the book-keeping process. If there are elements that aren't reflected in that, we'll need to know how the cmtys need to adjust the numbers. Is the budget working for your area as intended? Was our initial guess on target?

MONKEY: Dale will send out a short questionaire addressing these questions to the cmty conveners.

Convener feedback will be given to the budet review cmty. Dale will convene the budget review cmty. He will also do the recruiting, starting with the business meeting tomorrow night.

The cmty does a review, a document will be composed, and given to the community for discussion. This document will contain reccomendations. The community will hopefully just do fine tuning of this document.

We should create a deadline. The community needs to go through the two-step process to approve the process.

Dale will aim for a deadline of May 17th to bring the budget review cmty's reccomendations back for the first step of community approval. Willie would be a happy man if he could see the raw progress numbers reported back by the May 5th meeting. This being the amount alloted, spent, and percentage of each.


LCE modification liability:
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What does "workmanship manner" mean? Who can qualify this? What types of things should this cover?

We may want to re-evaluate our insurance deductible. It's $1k per incident. As part of our budget review, we need to make sure that buildings has adequately budgeted for deductibles.

Perhaps the insurance agent could report back to us with a reccomendation. We amateurs probably shouldn't pontificate on what the details are. We also have an insurance point person, and Judith was also willing to take on monkeys. Although, she'll be leaving a week from now, so she needs to be told soon.

MONKEY: Judith should contact our insurance person asking for a professional's reccomendation on LCE liability.


Next Meeting:
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Patti shall convene us. Jim Graham has graciously offered to host the meeting.


Freezer:
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Stuff that can wait for next mtg:
- Secure location for storage of financial documents
- CH loan is for 5 years, Dale suggests that we amortize the cost of the loan
over 5 years, and borrow this money from the LTCRF.
- LTCRF calculation - Sarah
- worker's comp - Kelly
- truck insurance - Kelly
- Proposal for Purchasing recommendations?
- re-evaluate F&L meeting schedule times