Dear Auntie
Can individual committee members be held responsible and liable for their incompetence? Yes, I mean ‘financially liable’. Our committee is generally amateur-hour stuff, but the chairperson in particularly is hopeless, not chairing meetings effectively and actively working against what’s best. This has resulted in me having to fork out a considerable amount of money in lost time and other things, and frankly, someone has to pay for that.
Regards, Wilhelmina
Dear Wilhelmina
Does someone really have to be responsible? In strata, enforcement of one’s rights is up to the individual and that invariably means spending money. There’s no automatic right of compensation or damages that flows from that.
Having said that, committee members do have protection from liability, for acts committed in good faith. Auntie obviously has no idea if your situation falls under that heading. Examples of not acting in good faith might be making a decision based on no objective information or failing to act when objective information is there. You’ll need legal advice on this point, Auntie thinks. So it may be possible, in other words.
If we are talking about things such as loss of rent, for example, then that is something the Commissioner’s Office generally cannot adjudicate upon. Read this adjudication order for an overview on why.
Auntie wants to leave you with this point: committees are volunteers. It’s true that ‘volunteer’ does not automatically mean ‘amateur’, or vice versa. Putting one’s hand up to be on a committee means a sometimes-significant investment of time and effort, for no rewards and often, a whole lot of grief. To put it bluntly, if you feel you can do better, then you should do so and be on the committee to make sure things are done properly. And if the committee is truly incompetent (and Auntie means not just a perception, but real, tangible and serious things gone wrong), then it could and should be replaced as a priority.
Do you have a question for Strata Solve’s Agony Aunt? You can ask it here. While Auntie deeply cares about your strata queries, she regrets she cannot give legal advice or answer every single question, as she is a busy woman.