Question: Our body corporate has introduced a ticketing system for regulating parking within the complex. This system has been added to the by-laws without approval at AGM or EGM. Is this appropriate, or is approval from owners required?
Answer: The best question might not be whether the committee fully upheld the legislation but does the system work.
By-laws can only be added or amended via a general meeting of owners, an AGM or EGM. If the committee introduced the bylaw, you should have had an opportunity to vote, and there would be a record of the vote.
If that hasn’t happened, it sounds like the ticketing system has been installed informally on the committee’s authority. Is this permissible? Maybe, depending on cost and how the system operates. It’s only possible to say with all of the information.
As a next step, you can contact your committee or body corporate manager and ask them to explain the system and why it was installed. Surely there has been some communication sent to owners about what it is and how it works?
If you are unhappy with the system, you can work through the complaints hierarchy – letter to the committee, motion to the committee, motion to a general meeting, complaint to the commissioner – to redress the issue.
It is possible, maybe likely, that the committee is overstepping its reach in some way if it has installed this system without consultation with the owners or any voting. If that is the case, the system should probably be removed until the committee has instituted correct procedures.
Still, there should be a lot of sympathy for committees trying to control parking issues with out of the box ideas because the formal help available to them is so limited. Many schemes have tried the means of resolution allowed by the legislation and have found them ineffective at resolving parking problems. The attorney general promised some new legislation around parking in February, but that office is still twiddling its thumbs on progressing the idea many months later. In these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that some owners will look at alternative solutions. The best question might not be whether the committee fully upheld the legislation but does the system work. Is the body corporate better off? If the answer to these questions is yes, the next step might be finding a way to have the system approved by owners at a meeting.
This post appears in the July 2023 edition of The QLD Strata Magazine.
William Marquand Tower Body Corporate E: willmarquand@towerbodycorporate.com.au P: 07 5609 4924