La Reunion Cooperative

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====== December 10, 2023 ======

Present: Paul (minutes), Beryl, Chinhae, Kate, Cory, Stormie (facilitator), Len, Bernard, Graham, Russ, Lorenzo, Jennifer, Alyssa, Philip, Bucky, Logan, Richard

===== Meet and Greet =====

Aspen (second meeting, approved)

===== Review of Minutes =====

Minutes approved with minor changes (added “first meeting” to meet & greet attendees).

===== Wiki Updates & Announcements =====

Wiki update: When assessing fines or rebates, each hour of labor will be worth $10.” updated to $15

—

Stormie, steward: There was discussion about the house using Slack like the board does. Not to replace email but for conversational and finance/coordination stuff.

Cory: Not sure about accessibility of Slack. There are people here who don’t get on the Internet often too.

===== Agenda Item 1 =====

(Stormie ) Officer reports

Leah, board: We’re still working on UFCU changes. We need to track down original signers for our old banks to get things transferred.

Russ, bookkeeper: 14 people were late this month, about average. I’m still missing receipts for November. There are some QuickBooks changes I’m still getting used to. Everything else is going well.

Alyssa, food buyer: It’ll be easier when I get the card. Put stuff on the board if it’s not in the staples list.

Corey, special financial advisor to the board: Don’t use your UFCU cards yet if you have one. We need to switch apartments dot com to it, and switch other payments from them as well. I’m going to visit Velocity & try to get that shut down again. We’re switching QuickBooks licenses and we’ll have a brief downtime, but I’ll let people know.

Logan, membership coordinator: I need roommates for Philip & Dwain. I submitted some maintenance tickets for Dwain’s unit after an inspection.

Logan, subbing for Nynke, events: Today is the day for opting into the Secret Santa. Only 13 - 14! - people have signed up so far. Give it to me after the meeting if you want. We plan to have the Secret Santa party on the 31st, merging with the NYE party.

Stormie, steward: Elections are ongoing, with nominations finishing after this meeting.

Kate, maintenance: Fire department approved our serviced fire extinguishers. More people have smoke alarms now - just a handful of units aren’t up-to-date. We need to plug holes against Sneaky Pete the rat.

Point of information: Reminder not to move any traps that are left out, or touch them. They’re set up strategically and the creatures will smell the human touch.

Len, treasurer: Same financial restructuring we’ve been talking about. I’ve got UFCU maintenance, treasurer, and food buyer cards for the future. We’ll be slowly migrating bills & money over. QuickBooks changes are disruptive to my work flows as well. Ive been adding some receipts as well, and hopefully depositing the last checks at Chase soon.

Philip, grounds: Everything’s running really good.

Paul: I appreciate how clean it is but I’m very frustrated by the daily leaf blower. Can we sweep or rake sometimes?

Russ: We talked about limiting it to Wednesdays and Sundays in the past.

Philip: I can do it Wednesdays and Sundays.

Bernard, labor: Still need some DCUs and cooks. We don’t have Wed DCU or Sat DCU. We’ve got lots of maintenance workers, and incoming workers who’ll enable more labor.

Russ: I’ll be able to do DCU and cook starting January.

Stormie: We’ve talked about assigning hours for an office admin for the house to do organizational and other tasks for the house.

===== Agenda Item 2 =====

(Stormie) Define and apply labor rebates to Phil if applicable.

Stormie: There’s rules in Labor:Fines & Rebates that discusses rebates for extra labor tasks. Do we collectively know anything about the origin or ongoing status of this rule? Would such a rebate be useful for Phil and his balance.

Cory: This is likely cringe inherited from Sasona. We’ve compensated people’s rent in the past if they did additional labor hours. The problem is that compensation counts as assistance provided, and if we spend more than $600/yr then we have to file taxes for them like independent contractor. We also had social problems around a position we created, because their continued housing was dependent on the labor rebates they were getting.

Point of information: Reminder that his caseworker said that they’ll be paying back all of his back rent when they pay us in January.

Point of information: Maybe we should talk about striking this section of the rules.

Cory: We can do things like this, we just have to be aware of the issues with it.\\
\\
**Tabled.**
===== Agenda Item 3 =====

(Stormie) Propose the change of election nomination rule to allow for a candidate to run for multiple officer positions with caveats for only holding one position post election.

Stormie: I misinterpreted the house rules around elections. I thought you had to pick them after the elections.

Paul: It’s defined by number of hours.

Cory: The basic principle is that you can’t run for more hours than you’re assigned.

Kate: What if we expanded the number of hours you could run for to 8, but you could still only accept one position? I think there should be an hour limit.

Paul: The rule was implemented to prevent someone lazy for running for multiple positions to avoid labor, so a very different situation.

Stormie: If the person with the most votes doesn’t accept one officer position, the position will go to the person with the next most votes.

Paul: This agenda item doesn’t say that.

Cory: I think the election would have to be re-run.

Concerns and friendly amendments

Russ: This doesn’t seem like it streamlines elections. If someone sees people’s names on a list, it might discourage them.

Stormie: I’ve heard people say our elections favor the incumbents so it’s pointless to run.

Leah: It’s possible to campaign against incumbents if you want. This is the result of a system without term limits.

Graham: We might miss out on someone with multiple skills with our current system. The drawback with the proposed system is that we might need multiple runoffs for each position.

Cory: If it’s about ranked choice we could discuss that. I’m not opposed.

Paul: It’d be a big change.

Paul: Our usual problem is positions with no nominations. This wouldn’t help with that, but I see numerous situations where it immediately leads to special elections.

Stormie: I’m prepared to table this. We can continue to discuss it. I also want to have discussions having longer elections, like six weeks, so we can do more officer knowledge transfers, or the idea of having a meeting specifically for campaigns.

**Tabled.**
===== New business =====

Point of information: Some members have been letting their puppies poop on the concrete outside. I tried to talk to them and they said it was part of their unit and not a problem.

Point of information: Even newspaper or a plastic liner would help. I’ve been cleaning it but water flows downhill too.

—

Cory: City of Austin no longer has parking minimums for buildings. We can now build permanent structures where our parking lots currently exist. We’ve been discussing broad ideas - a maintenance workshop, a bike shed, a new common space, additional apartment units - 2 bedroom, 1 bedroom, efficiencies?

Clarifying question: Parking has been getting tighter. Do we have towing set up?

Cory: I’ve got the parking tags. We can’t really enforce a towing policy unless we have it in our lease, unless they’re straight-up illegally abandoned. I can put up no-parking signs though.
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