A friend, not super close, but a lovely person in my general social circle, was recently hospitalized after an accident. She faces surgery and possibly a stay in rehab. Loads of people would like to stay in touch, have updates, help out with whatever.
She certainly doesn’t need to respond individually to 50 emails or texts, so does anyone have a suggestion for how to organize a central point of contact for disparate friends? Not everyone is on Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever, and with different various social circles, not everyone has everyone’s email. Is there some way to do this?”
You’ve probably never read your building’s property management contract all the way through. Most board members haven’t either. If you did, you’d find a carefully defined scope of work — vendors coordinated, maintenance dispatched, assessments collected, reports generated.
What you wouldn’t find: anything about fiduciary duties. Reserve funding strategy. Compliance tracking. Case documentation. Institutional memory. The legal obligations that make your board personally accountable to unit owners.
That’s not an oversight in the contract. It’s the contract. Property management was never designed to cover governance. And yet most boards — paying $10,000 to $18,000 a year for the service — assume it does.
Operations and governance are different jobs. One has a contract. The other has a fiduciary duty.
What your building is paying — and what it’s getting.
What the contract covers. What it doesn’t.
The markup problem most boards don’t know about.
Beyond the management fee, most property management companies mark up vendor invoices — the plumber, the landscaper, the elevator contractor — by 10 to 15 percent before passing the bill to the association. It’s legal. It’s common. And boards have almost no visibility into it. (more…)
kp writes: “who else has been victimized by the new intersection at NY and FL?! it was honestly better w the Wendy’s. i have sat through ten minutes of light cycles here five times in the last two weeks. do better”
DDOT says: “Anticipated Construction Completion December 2024”
Update: “Alley cleaning is different. Our street cleaning definitely went until October 31”
“Dear PoPville,
Has DPW quietly changed street sweeping to end October 1 (as opposed to Oct 31) without telling anyone? All the street signs say street seeping goes through October 31, but I just saw this today:
“DPW works to clean streets and alleys from the first Monday in April through September 30th. Alley cleaning is suspended from October 1st through March 31st. Alley Cleaning Services include cleaning up loose litter, debris, glass, gravel, sand, and liquid spills in the alley”
Have folks noticed if these signs have changed? (more…)
