McCrary & Associates, P.C.

An interesting turn of events for condominium owners: Last week, the Georgia Court of Appeals handed down a ruling in the case of Demere Landing Condominium Owners Association v. Matthews. The ruling essentially states that, unless the condominium documents state otherwise, proxies cannot be used to determine the existence of a quorum at meeting of condo associations.

For years, I have done work both for, and in some cases against, condo associations. It is always hard to get unit owners to attend the annual meeting of owners, where things like budgets and assessments are decided. I believe that it has historically been assumed that, if a quorum of living, breathing people do not appear, the meeting can still proceed if there a sufficient number of people present, personally OR BY PROXY. In some cases, the condo documents say this explicitly. In some cases, they do not. If the documents do not address this issue, however, under the new decision, and if a quorum is not actually, physically present, then any action taken at the meeting might be invalid.

Though this is an innocuous ruling to many, it may cause an upheaval within the condo management and legal communities. There are probably quite a few special assessments which have been levied in Association meetings where no valid quorum was present.

H.B. 397. There was an interesting article in the Daily Report this week about H.B. 397, currently under consideration by the Georgia legislature, concerning the Georgia Open Records Act.

All Georgia citizens are currently entitled to access to certain public records, under the Georgia Open Records Act. There are exclusions under the Act for certain types of arguably confidential information, such as personnel records, medical information and the like. Currently, a governmental entity presented with an Open Records Act request can charge $.25 per page for producing such documents.

H.B. 397 currently under consideration during the present legislative session, would reduce the per-page charge for records to $.10, but would also allow government offices to also pass along to the requesting citizen reasonable legal fees for the government redacting private information from such requested records.

Problematical with this bill, is the fact that "reasonable legal fees" is a very subjective concept. This bill may create a very serious impediment to citizens being able to obtain access to public records as necessary to prove their claims against governmental offices, such as claims of corruption, etc. The parties might have to go to court, at considerable expense to the requesting party, in order to determine if the fee charged is "reasonable." And, in that event, presumably the government would b able to recoup those fees as well from the requesting party.

And, we have a sense of humor too:http://mccrarylawyers.com/a_bit_of_humour.htm

A Little Humor The next daty the following notice appeared in the paper: "We regret that the report of Attorney Critchley's death was in error."