Finance & Legal minutes: 2009-10-26

Minutes:

Minutes of 10/26/09 Finance & Legal Meeting

Present: Elph, Amy

1. Status of policy regarding late association fees

We did not approve the policy at our last meeting. Elph sent out a document with the accumulated changes to date. Amy had wanted to review Cher's suggestions before approving the policy document. After reading Chern's suggestions, Amy had no further changes to suggest Cher's ideas were already addressed in a sentence that had been left out of the proposal that was distributed at the community meeting. There was an e-mail thread about the APR question after the last meeting. Some people suggested using a flat fee instead. Elph pointed out that the purpose of the fee is as a driver to get people to pay their debt. APR is not applicable because the debt is not held for years, and because this is not a loan: no one has agreed to loan the money. If the community agrees to loan people money, then an APR is appropriate. The late fee is a penalty. Re: the suggestion to make the fee similar to a check bounce fee -- Elph pointed out that 4% is a lot less than this. We already have a flat $15/mo fee and people ignore it. At 4%/mo it's ~$10 for the first month, $20 for the second month. $30 for the third month and so on.

We'd rather wait until more of our committee is here to approve the policy but we think it's nearly ready. We talked about taking the fee rate back to 5%, to get people to pay attention to it and pay their debt.

2. Audit & Taxes line item in 2010 budget proposal

We are glad that Adi pointed out that we need to have an audit each year and that we need to add this to the budget. We agree with the new line item of $2000, which includes both the audit and tax preparation.

3. Update on Monkeys

MONKEY: Elph will send another reminder to the community for input, questions, etc. for Paul Conahan to consider as part of the reserve study. - DONE
MONKEY: Elph will ask Bill Kinley what he knows about the various vendors for fire suppression systems. Who does Phoenix use for inspections. -RE-MONKEY

4. Next meeting: November 2