Your Project Will Outlive This Board
It's month five of a nine-month project, and the association just held its annual meeting.
Three of five seats changed hands. At the new board's first meeting, the questions start, and every one of them is fair:
Why did we pick this contractor?
Who approved that color?
What is this forty-six thousand dollar change order doing on the agenda?
Can we still change the railing?
Nobody in that room was there for any of those decisions. The two returning directors remember the outcomes but not the reasoning. The manager has the emails somewhere, in a thread with sixty replies and four attachments. The contractor is waiting on an answer that was due eleven days ago.
Nothing went wrong here. The association held an election, which its own documents require it to do.
The arithmetic nobody runs
A capital project worth hiring help for runs six to eighteen months. Behind it sits a twelve month warranty period, and behind that a retainage release and an eleven month walk.
Board terms run one to two years, usually staggered.
Do that math once and it stops being a risk to manage. Every project of consequence will span at least one election, and its warranty will span two. Turnover is not a thing that might happen to your project. It is a certainty you either design around or absorb.
Most boards absorb it, and here is what it costs.
Four things that happen when the memory leaves
1. Orientation time becomes a delay claim.
The contractor's RFI, submittal, or change order request sits while three new directors get up to speed on a project they inherited. That is reasonable. It is also billable. Owner caused delay is compensable under most construction contracts, contractors log it contemporaneously because that is what their project managers are trained to do, and it arrives in month seven as a number with dates attached.
I wrote earlier in this series about the gap where nobody on the owner's side is assigned to respond. An election widens that gap on a schedule you can predict a year in advance.
2. Reopening a decision is a change order, not a conversation.
A new director asks whether the railing can still be changed. It is a good question and nobody on the board can answer it, because the answer depends on where that railing sits in the procurement chain. If the submittal is approved and the material is fabricated, changing it is restocking, resubmittal, lead time, and a schedule impact, and it will cost more than anyone in the room expects.
New directors have no way of knowing which decisions are still soft and which are already inside a purchase order. So they ask about all of them, and the board spends twenty minutes of a meeting reconstructing a decision from memory instead of governing.
3. Leverage quietly disappears.
A contractor who senses there is no continuity on the owner's side gets bolder. Not dishonest, just bolder. When nobody left at the table can say that is not what we agreed at the pre-construction meeting, and mean it, with a document behind it, the marginal change order starts looking a lot more collectible.
Institutional memory is not sentimentality. It is a negotiating position, and it walks out the door with the outgoing president.
4. The warranty falls off the calendar.
This is the expensive one, and it is the quietest. The eleven month walk lands on a board that never saw the project, does not know the walk exists, and has no reason to think about a building that looks finished. Retainage sits unreleased, or gets released early because someone wanted the file closed. The warranty expires without anyone having looked.
The fix is filing, not personality
None of this requires better directors. It requires five cheap things, and you can put all of them in place before your next election.
A one page project decision log. Date, decision, who made it, what it cost, where the backup lives. One line per decision. Maintained by the manager or the owner's rep, and attached to the board packet every month so it lands in the minutes. This is the highest leverage item on the list by a wide margin, and it takes about ten minutes a month. A board that can answer why did we decide that in ten seconds does not relitigate.
Delegate to the role, not to the person. At award, adopt a resolution that creates a project liaison position, a dollar threshold for change order authority, and a commitment to respond within a set number of business days. A resolution survives an election. A particular director may not. Have your attorney write it, because what a board can delegate and how is governed by your declaration, your bylaws, and state statute, and that is their lane rather than mine.
Own your own records. An association email address, an association shared drive, and a contract notice address in the association's name. Go look at the notice clause in your current construction contract right now. If there is a personal Gmail address in it, your project's legal notices are being delivered to someone who may not be on the board next spring.
A thirty minute handoff for incoming directors. Not a document dump, which nobody reads. One page: what we are building, what it costs, what is already decided and paid for, what is still open, who to call.
Put the dates where they survive. Substantial completion, retainage release, warranty expiration, and the eleven month walk go on the association's calendar, in the manager's tickler, and in the reserve study notes. Not in a director's phone.
The bigger point
The new directors are not the problem. They are doing exactly what they were elected to do by asking why, and a board that stops asking why is a worse board.
The problem is that on most projects the answers were never written down anywhere those directors could find them. So a normal, healthy, legally required event turns into three weeks of delay, a reopened selection, and a warranty nobody watched.
You cannot stop turnover. What you can do is make it boring.
Next time: the warranty you think you have, and the four ways it turns out you don't.
Sean Davis, PMP | Civil Engineer | Owners Representative for HOA's and their Community Managers | Current HOA Board Member (12 years) | DHA Construction Management | Broomfield, CO
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