This article discusses body corporate responsibility for strata bins and the need to manage common property and comply with council requirements.
Question: Our by-laws stipulate bins are the responsibility of each lot. Due to space restrictions, each lot doesn’t have a dedicated bin, and no one person wishes to be responsible for community bins. Council hasn’t helped. What do we do?
We are residents of a small complex of eight units and have just lost the person who volunteered to manage our bins for the past eighteen years. Responsibility for the bins now falls to each resident, as stipulated in our standard by-laws.
Council is not happy as our bin enclosure only has a capacity for ten bins. We intend to house eight waste bins in the enclosure and accommodate eight recycle bins in the front patio of each unit, but Council is not happy with this arrangement either.
Do by-laws overrule Council edicts. Conversely, when Council approved the initial plan, would they have required the developer to either comply with the by-laws or build an enclosure big enough to house all sixteen bins? As it stands, we are stuck with a problem. No one is willing to manage shared bins, and we are not willing to pay someone to do the job. We only have six of each bin type, and only five of each type fit in the bin enclosure, so it is impossible to allocate a bin to each lot.
Answer: At the end of the day, the responsibility lies with the body corporate to appropriately manage common property.
It is not a case of by-laws trumping Council requirements or vice versa. At the end of the day, the responsibility lies with the body corporate to appropriately manage common property. Respectfully, it is not appropriate for the body corporate to say ‘it’s impossible’ (in my view, NOTHING is impossible in a strata situation), or ‘it’s too expensive’, or ‘it’s Council’s fault’, or ‘the developer should have done something’. It will be up to the committee to work with Council to look at solutions and communicate to owners about what their responsibility is.
That responsibility will more than likely be, as you have pointed out, via the by-laws: if a by-law requires an occupier to do something, then the onus is on both the occupier to comply, as well as the body corporate to enforce that by-law. So if the occupiers (owners) have to put bins out, then frankly, it’s too bad if they’d rather not. Also, common property or lots must not be used in a way that might cause a nuisance or hazard, and I think most people would accept that unmaintained or unemptied bins would have considerable potential to cause both things.
The body corporate may need to examine what other options it has with common property to house the bins. If it costs the body corporate money to do any of this, then I’m afraid there is no way around that: the body corporate cannot absolve itself of responsibility because it does not want to spend the money.
It might be time for the committee and owners to discuss these issues and any related matters. Otherwise, there’s potential for this problem to impact property values negatively.
This is general information only and not intended as legal advice.
This post appears in Strata News #652.
Chris Irons Strata Solve E: chris@stratasolve.com.au P: 0419 805 898