AGM 2008 (november 8th)

Hi can i ask has all the 300 euros that have been payed from the owners are they included it these figures,excluding what arrohabitatge has of these?thanks irene

The fees in the statement dated 31/8 2008 of 246781,75E:

Initial fees   208*300E          62.400
Fee legal report                     11.033
Fee from Octob-august     173.348

Total                                      246.781

Arrohabitatge has not paid   55*300    16500
Communityfees                                       19573

Other neigbhours                                    39123

Last week GICS said they expected the 16500e very soon. But in Spain very soon might be a while.


This message was last edited by solgre on 10/21/2008.

Thanks for that so we have used those funds to no reserve bye irene

 Hi Gericomm,
 
The difference between the stated amount for Arrohabitatge fees (19573,21) and the sum of debtors called Arrohabitatge has two major causes:

1)       lots of parking spaces were only recently discovered to be owned by Arrohabitatge. This is part of the problem of the administrator. They never got a list of owners, parking spaces and storage rooms. Going to the register is very expensive for 208 apartments is very expensive and the committee agreed that it didn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on a moving target. Do realize that completions were going on at a regular rate until May at least. Only then we authorized them to spend the money for the register. However parking spaces were not in the normal records, but only in the extended ones which were even more costly. For a long time we hoped to get most of the information of the owners which worked but took time.
 

2)       Recently the administrator transferred all the Arrohabitatge apartment fees to a newly created post to make it more clear. However after doing that a new month was added to the individual Arrohabitatge accounts for each apartment. This is not uncommon to do in bookkeeping. You keep the individual accounts as they could be transferred to a new owner and once in a while you move the open debt to the summary account. 

 
So part of the Arrohabitatge debt is currently hidden in the ‘Neighbours fee’. Again from a bookkeeping point of view this is not so strange, but admittedly it’s confusing. Took me some time looking at the figures to figure it out and only because I have a print out of the underlying accounts in my possession.

 

So you’re right about the total debt of Arrohabitatge.
 
Max

The legal obligation to have a 5% reserve doesn't stand if you are properly insured (which we are for the law). 

Our initial fund of 62.500E has not disappeared but mostly shows as a debt of the owners. Depending on your estimates it's either 95% of it's original value (in case we collect all debts over time) or lower if you're pessimistic. It certainly is not zero. At a 50% overly pessimistic rate of  debt collection it's still a substantial reserve. Let's wait until the first court cases are settled to see how pessimistic we must be.

As long as we have at least a proper budget with enough safeguards against using this virtual reserve fund we are pretty safe if we can solve the cash flow problems.

Max

Hi Max

I think whatever the cost was to go to the register to find out who these owners were that did not pay, should be divided up between all the owners that were in debt, and passed on to them as an additional fine, as well as the interest penalties as well. Why should we all pay to chase them up. As for the Arrohabitage debt, if they don't pay up soon court action should be taken, and maybe take possesion of a couple of their apartments as payment, rent them out long term, put that money back into the community pot, then sell the apartments in a few years time once the property market has recovered.

Solgre. The last time I heard the words " very soon " from Arrohabitage, it took about 2 years, so don't hold your breath.

Westport

Irma just told me that Arrohabitage plan to pay their community fees so that they can vote at the meeting. It will be good if they pay but it will make proxies important again as there is the danger they will try to make Nuria or someone like her President.

I think we need to get a name put forward for someone who we think would do a good job as president as soon as possible. At the moment, I know no one who is Spanish, but speaks English to vote for. In matter of fact, I know no one who has officially put their name forward for president or vice president officially. Who can people recommend for both roles, and why. Also have these people put their names forward for the roles. If we don't get this organised quickly, we could end up in the hands of Arrohabitage. I think its safe to say, the large majority don't want that, so make sure you get your proxy votes in as soon as we know candidates for each role. I think we need to concentrate our votes on one individual for each role based on the recommendations of the current committee and those living on Don Juan that see the day to day workings of it. If we end up all dividing our votes between 3, 4 or 5 names for each role, we could be in a weak position, and find ourselves getting fewer votes than Arrohabitage. Please put your names forward those of you willing to take up the positions of president, vice president or committee member,  and Max or David open a seperate post titled " Proxy Vote " giving the details of how to vote, and who to email it back to. Does it have to be printed off, signed, and posted back to the person we are voting for, or can it be copy and pasted onto an email and sent back to the person we are voting for, or does it get sent to someone else. Max or David, just out of interest, if Arrohabitage do pay up in full, how many votes will they have including the family apartments, and known friends who own apartments that may vote for them. Do you know how many votes they got last year, and what was the percentage of overall voting turnout.

Westport

I will be over for the AGM. I am happy to put my name forward to join the committee. I am over in Spain very regular but I am unsure if people will feel that is enough. My Spanish is not that good yet but I keep trying and I am very interested in the running of the community. David and Max usually carry the proxie votes but if they feel it of any benefit I could also do that. How many people are needed on the committee? If there are a limited number and there is someone who would be more suitable I am okay with that.

I would also prefer to know in advance if possible who may be standing for President or Vice President so that I could be more prepared on the day. It does not bear thinking about what could happen if we are not prepared.

Hi Westport & Janmet,

Thank you for your constructive posts. I had promised to make clear what I would be voting for before asking for people for their proxies. I have perhaps been trying to hard to get everything sorted including a list of suitable people willing to serve on the committee - which is still a work in progress so here is some information to be going on with.
I do not believe that there is multi lingual candidate suitable and willing to be President. I am therefore supporting Rene's sugestion of Pepe. He is a senior executive in a glazing company and although a busy man wants to see Don Juan sorted out for the benefit of all. I am impressed by his business like approach and appreciation of the contribution Northern Europeans have made to the prosperity of Costa Del Sol.
I have been asked by a number of people if I will stand as Vice President. If a better English speaking candidate emerges I will stand aside but I am willing to take it on for a year.
Communication between English and Spanish speakers on the committee is vital and I am pleased to say Ana is willing to be a "vocal".
Javier who has worked extremely hard is also, as Max has said, willing to continue as a vocal.
It is not possible at this stage to say exactly how many additional vocals we should have or who they will be but we want to see proper representation of the whole community. I would not rule out someone who is not a full or part time resident. Holiday home owners are the majority and they should be represented and can participate in meetings when they are in Spain, keeping in touch by e-mail when they are not. However one of the responsibilities of the committee is to deal with those who have altered the appearance of the urbanisation by, for example erecting their own satelite dishes or putting up aircon boxes where they are not allowed and it would not be appropriate for someone who has done this to be on the committee.
I have met with the Spanish "team" outlined above and I must say I am encouraged by thier commitment and their desire to ensure all residents views are taken into account. For example I mentioned the swimming pool opening. It is more expensive to maintain a pool in use than when it is closed so it is important not to keep the pools open unnecessarily but they suggested we should open 1 pool from March to October and the other from June to September. This seems to be me to be good balance between  looking after community funds and allowing residents to use the facilities they are paying for.
There are a number of EOS members who will be at the AGM I do urge everyone to use their proxies. Obviously appoint someone to vote on your behalf that you feel you can trust. E-mailed or even PMed mssages are valid.
  

Hi Davmunster

I am glad to see we finally have some names to put forward. Can you put a post on the site giving us an example of the wording of the email required for voting in a president, vice president, and the person we wish to choose to use our proxy vote, so we can copy and paste it into an email and just fill in our choices, just so we make sure we are voting legally.

Please explain for example, if I chose Pepe for the role of president, surely I could not send my proxy vote to him, as he would be voting for himself, or am I getting confused here.

I am so pleased Ana is still willing to help out.

How many are we looking to be on the committee.

How often do you make it over Janmet.

Do we put forward names that we would like to have on the committee but not as president or vice president.

I would love to try and help out, but unfortunately I cannot make it over as often as I would like to.

Finally, I would just like to say a big thank you to everyone who has tried to make Don Juan a good working community in the first year. It is always hard to get everything right in the first 12 months. I know we have all had our ups and downs and arguments etc, but that can only make us stronger in the long run as we all have the same ambitions to get Don Juan working efficiently. Good luck to the new committee.

Westport

Hi Westport 

In answer to your question for 2008 I have been or will be over in Spain
January, March, June, July, August, September, November, December all for approx one or two week periods. I hope to follow a similar pattern next year if possible.

Hi Janice
You certainly seem to be here enough to make a useful contribution.
Hi Westport
To answer your points in order:
I will do  a separate post with the proxy wording. If you want to add specific instructions to a proxy simple add them at the bottom
There is no reason why you cannot appoint Pepe as your proxy and vote for him to be president. By acting as your proxy he is simply acting on your behalf - your vote does not become his so he is not voting for himself.
To be workable the committee should not be to big but it should be representative. My personal opinion is that it would be good to have 2 additional foreign residents but it is not for me to decide.
I do not think it would be a good idea to put forward names you would like to see on the committee. It is hard work. Members will be expected to do their share - not only attending meetings which will have to be in the evening to accomodate Ana but sharing other duties including talking to neighbours about breeches of the rules etc. So please ask people first and if they are willing put their names forward 

Standard proxy wording as requested:

DELEGACIÓN/ PROXY

 

D.________________________________________________________________________________________

 

como propietario del inmueble / Owner of the house __________________ Sito en Residencial Don Juan Fase 1 /of Residencial Don Juan.  A través del presente escrito concede autorización a / I grant authorization to:

 

D.___________________________________________________________________________ para la asistencia y votación en la Junta de esta comunidad, a celebrar el día 8 de noviembre / for the attendance and voting in the 2008,november 8th Meeting.

Just a short report of our recent committee meeting. It’s was quite frustrating as we still have no budget prepared for the AGM. The administrator wanted to base it on the historical data as posted below which is the total amount spend from the first of October 2007 until August 2008 which would be ridiculous. 
 
I showed my own compilation of the figures which clearly show that we are overspending if we continue on our current spending level. We either need to lower our expenses or raise the fees otherwise our reserve of the initial 300E per owner will have to be used. I promised the administrator that I will give them my figures for presentation at the next AGM. However we still need a proper balanced budget in my view so an extra committee meeting will be needed L As things are going I guess I’ll have to make a budget proposal which will be used for the AGM as the reference for decisions. I will publish the figures on EOS as soon as possible.
 
We did some useful things like preparing the procedures for the AGM. Things like voter registration with multiple lists to speed up the process, searching for a moderator who has to make sure  all people and both languages get reasonable time slots, availability of a microphone and projector, etc.
 
The most complex issue discussed was the future cooperation with phase II. Their town hall license depends on our decision at the AGM. Phase II will never get a license as an independent development as the town hall considers it a necessity that they have access to water (we control it), electricity for the common areas etc. So we either merge (impossible because you need 100% of the votes of both communities) or a contract between the two phases. Maximo has written a sort of informal proposal / advise for the councillor for infrastructure of Fuengirola of which I got a copy and (again informally) agree with. However afaik his letter is not even publically known. This will be a very difficult issue to decide on at the AGM. Even within the committee there are slightly different views. As my opinion is the minority opinion I will leave it to David to first explain how the majority sees it.
 
The reason Arrohabitatge will probably pay up is that they want voting rights at the meeting. The only thing they are really interested in is forcing a positive decision on the future contract with phase II. They depend on it for completion so that makes it worth their money.

Max

I do want to say something about the ideal future committee based on my experiences in the last year. In my view the committee has to be small to speed up decision making and to make sure people’s agenda don’t become an obstacle. Initially we voted for a president, vice president and two vocals. The original proposal at the first meeting was one member! As it became clear that not all voted members show up it would be wise to have at least two again. Our committee grew in a natural way: Javier, Ana, David and Pépé joined us without ever being elected although they were never at all meetings.
 
The most important thing is not the number of people, but their contribution. You have to do actual work and/or provide unique insights to be important for the committee. Tonia was often a disaster, BUT she knew a lot about Don Juan and she worked hard to get things done. Javier has a lot of time during business hours and knows his way in the town hall so made a unique contribution, Hernan is a business man and knew how to negotiate and get proper deals. 
 
In the new committee as proposed there is technical knowledge (Pépé), business knowledge (Pépé and David), a representative of the EOS community (David), a resident Spanish with the capability to translate (Ana) and Javier with known skills. Note however that there is only one resident in this committee which is a pity as they usually know best what’s really going on. When voting I will be in favour of candidates who can make a unique contribution. Most of the work is done outside of the actual meetings: writing letters, preparing budgets, contacting people, influencing policy makers, making deals etc.
 
I have spoken with a few people who could do this very well, but are not willing to commit themselves to actual membership. I hope that the future committee will be small and flexible enough to use these people resources. Someone with proper bookkeeping/accounting skills would f.i. be a great asset.
 
Max

Most of the items on the agenda are straightforward. There are 2 that may not be:

Item 5 Budget. If you add the cost of water to our current expenditure our current fees fall short of projected expenditure by 9%. It will be a major priority for the new committee to reduce costs. An overall reduction of 9% will be hard to achieve without a reduction in some services. The question to be decided is do we maintain the fee at the current level and leave it to the committee to somehow keep expenditure below this level with no contingency fund. The alternative would be to agree a small increase which if costs are well controlled would allow for some improvements to be made.

Item 10 Possible unification with phase 2. Some sort of agreement has to be reached as we own the water cistern (it is in our land) which is designed to supply the whole of Don Juan. The positives for some form of unification are:

·         Reduced cost for both communities as we would use common service providers

·         A feeling of 1 community with no controversy over who uses which part of the external area or facilities. (We certainly don’t want a Berlin scenario where we erect a fence along the middle of the path between the 2 phases and between the grass area at the back of block 5 [which actually belongs to us] and the phase 2 swimming pool)

·         Max and Maximo are of the view that this would please the town councillor responsible for infrastructure and might result in a speedy resolution of the road situation. There is no connection between the 2 issues and I am not convinced it will make any difference

The negatives are:

·         GICS will become the administrator of Phase 2 making it more difficult for us to change administrator soon after the AGM.

·         A formula for sharing costs will have to be agreed

·         Phase 2 will have to agree to adopt our rules and as we haven’t even agreed them ourselves yet this is going to be complex

·         The developer who currently controls all of phase 2 could use their place in a unified community to undo all the good work already done in phase 1

My view, and that of Javier, is that we would agree to the proposal when Arrohabitadge pays for the necessary repairs to Phase 1 as outlined in the Architect’s Report. This is of course unlikely to happen as they probably don’t have 1.8M€ in hand to give us. We do not want to hold Phase 2 Residents to ransom but this is a one off chance to exert some leverage on the Developer and it would be a pity if we didn’t at least try to get something out of it.

I am sorry for the long post. This is a complex issue. It is very important that we make the right decision as it will not be possible to change our minds later.

It seems to me that this is a good development. It makes a lot of sense to have both phases operated as one community since much of the infrastructure is common to both and surely it will be a nightmare trying to operate separately. Obviously there are some disadvantages as listed by Davmunster.  I don't see a problem in retaining GICS for another while if it means getting this through. Similarly I feel the costs and rules issues are surmountable.  After all, it appears to me that no community exists for Phase 2 as of yet. I think the biggest problem is how to get this measure through while extracting all we can from the developer and keeping control of the enlarged community.  Perhaps a suitable clause could be inserted with the agreement of Arrohabitatge confirming that they will not use their voting rights in certain ways while they continue to own substantial numbers of unsold apartments.  I think it's very unlikely that they will hand over €1.8m to fix necessary repairs as outlined in the Architect's report and I really wonder if we would get this even if the court finds in our favour. As well it could be many years before such a case gets heard in court. I read recently that there is a 4 year backlog on court cases in Malaga generally with Fuengirola being worst.  I think it is more likely that they would offer to do the work themselves if they are very pressed to obtain our agreement in this matter.  Therefore we may have to consider forgetting about the court case in favour of extracting all we can in the current scenario.  Legal advice on all of this is essential if we are to make progress and obviously time is running out with the AGM date of 8th November looming.  All in all I think it is most important that we grasp this opportunity to gain control of the entire complex and extract concessions from the developer in the process. 

I have been reading the latest post several times trying to make up my mind.

Phase 1 has about 208 apartments
Phase 2 has about 104 apartments

If our annual costs are about 180,000E, they will probably raise with 1/3 (-10%-20% with some benefits working together)

We know from the past year that Arrohabitatge is not paying community fees for unsold apartments. Would it be legal to demand a bankgurantee from developer to cover fx 2 years of annual fee for unsold apartrmetns?  This will enssure income to the community, and certainly make Arrohabitatge interested in providing needed information to GICS

I have no idea of the number of unsodl apartments in phase 2, but will assume that several have been released from their contract because of the delay with FLO. I would very much like to see phase 1 + 2 as one community, but I find it important to ensure some income for a period.

I do not think we should mix the Legal Report with this matter, even if that would be nice to solve this problem.  In spite of my frustrations towards GICS I could accept them for a periode if we succeed in solving this matter. Maybe we could put pressure to the Townhall with the accesroad(they would like theese matters solved too). Who says that the accesroad must be built on the land of renfe?  Why not make a road right by the side of their land?

No matter  of all our ideas I think we MUST take legal advice in this matter
Grethe

  As you will have guessed my minority view is that we should work with the councilor and be realistic about our demands. There are several reasons for it:

-          we will never get the 1.8 million before the court has spoken

-          demanding this will be seen as beyond reasonable by the town hall. They could make our life quite difficult as we depend on them for several issues

-          I’m not in favour of raising the budget and a contractual cooperation with phase II (it won’t be a merger) would according to my calculations solve our imminent deficit.

-          We could demand provisions in the contract for guaranteed payments of fees as long as Arrohabitatge is the owner of apartments of (parts of) phase I and II.

-          The same for the initial community fee. We could demand payment for outstanding bills for phase I and an initial contribution for phase II (the last one could be recovered by Arrohabitatge at completion time from the buyers).

-          It would improve the value of both our communities if we work together, share the infrastructure and services etc.

-          It’s not that Gics can’t be fired if this goes through: the proposal is that phase II has to accept our existing rules, service providers etc. If we really want to change Gics now (I don’t: I want our political problems sorted out first) than we probably can.

-          We have to find some terms f.i. how or when phase II owners are allowed to participate in the selection of new providers. Work for a lawyer and the new committee to be followed by an EGM.

-          Arrohabitatge will be eager to get this deal so all of the above seems realistic as a negotiation result.

 Max