Q: Does your HOA board use a consent calendar as part of its regular meeting procedure? If not, your board is missing a chance to preserve meeting time and energy for agenda items requiring discussion.
Board meetings lasting beyond two hours in length will tax the concentration of both directors and audience. By two hours, exhaustion sets in and the quality of deliberation progressively deteriorates, so measures reducing time are important. Reasonable strategies to streamline meetings preserves time and energy resources for the agenda items needing deliberation.
Many directors feel that they aren’t doing their job as board members unless they comment on each item of business. If such comments address items on which the board’s consensus is clear, such commentary unduly consumes valuable time instead of allowing the board to proceed to vote on those non-controversial items.
A consent calendar is a grouping of items on the agenda, which are not expected to require discussion. Such matters could include approval of repeating expenditures, liens on delinquent members, routine contract renewals, or anything else which is not expected to be controversial.
The consent calendar items are part of the agenda and so must be announced in advance, per California Civil Code Section 4930.
Once the chair of the meeting confirms a quorum is present and calls the meeting to order, the first item of business should be approval of the agenda. This is the time when any director may ask that an item be moved from the consent calendar into either new business or old business.
There is no discussing requests for removal from the consent calendar, and no motion is required — simply the director’s request that the item be removed. Items are usually removed from the consent calendar because a director has questions or wishes to disagree with the proposed action.
When it is time for the consent calendar to be addressed, the chair asks for a motion and a second on the consent calendar. Once the consent calendar is moved and seconded, there is no discussion and there are no questions — the whole point of the consent calendar is to eliminate unnecessary discussions. So, after the motion and second, the chair calls for the vote — and often 5–10 items (or more) can be decided in literally a minute. The meeting minutes will still record the actions taken in the consent calendar.
Large associations should have written meeting rules, and those rules should also include a simple consent calendar policy.
Here are some tips regarding consent calendars:
- The consent items must be on the announced agenda and recorded in the minutes after approval.
- There is no discussion regarding the consent calendar, and no director must state a reason for asking to remove an item from it.
- Just because an item might be on the consent calendar doesn’t mean that homeowners cannot discuss it during open forum. Although some boards try to restrict open forum subjects, Civil Code Section 4925(b), the statute which requires open forum, does not limit the content of someone’s open forum statements.
- Consent calendars should not be used to avoid discussing major items in open session. Don’t pre-discuss agenda items — that betrays the trust of the neighbors and renders the meeting a sham.
More effective meetings enhance the likelihood of better decisions.
Kelly G. Richardson CCAL is a Fellow of the College of Community Association Lawyers and Partner of Richardson Ober LLP, a California law firm known for community association advice. Send questions to [email protected].
