Condo Media - April 2017 - 18

Asked & Answered

Fully Charged

Installing and Maintaining Electric Car Charging Stations

Q
A

CONDOMEDIA

An owner has asked the board about installing an
electric car charging station for his new electric
car. Do we have to approve the request, and, if we
do, who is responsible for the cost of installing and
maintaining the equipment?

Unless your governing documents specifically require
you to accommodate this request, you aren't required to
do so-but you probably should. While this owner may be
the first to seek a charging station for an electric car, he
almost certainly won't be the last. According to industry
statistics, there were approximately 540,000 electric
cars on the road in the United States last year; that's up
from 73,000 in 2012. The trend is clear. But it also raises
a number of complicated policy questions for community
associations, starting with the one you identified: Who
pays for the recharging equipment electric cars require?
If you're talking about a single owner or even a handful of them in a large community, the obvious answer-
and the fair one-is: The owners who use the equipment
should pay for it. But as the number of electric car owners increases, the argument for making this a common
area expense becomes more compelling. Among other
considerations: Communities that lack charging stations will have trouble competing for buyers with new
developments that are including them and with older
communities that will be adding them.
In these early days, however, requiring the owners
who want the stations to pay for them makes sense.
Cost allocation is only one of the questions condominium boards will have to address. Even more challenging: Where will the charging stations be located?
That's not a problem if owners have separate garages
or if the board can simply designate spaces for electric
cars (although some owners will no doubt be unhappy
with the board's decisions); it's considerably more complicated if parking spaces are deeded or assigned. What
do you do if the best, or possibly the only feasible spot
is occupied by someone who doesn't have an electric
car? You can ask this owner, politely, to swap; but if it's a
deeded space, you can't force the owner to relinquish it.
The best bet here is to hope the owners involved in the
debate will be able to reach an agreement.

Industry executives offer these additional suggestions to boards as they consider the likely growth in
electric car ownership:

Establish policies governing charging stations
before you start fielding requests for them. The
policies should specify who will pay for the installation, repair, and maintenance of the equipment.

If owners are responsible for installation, boards
should either arrange for and oversee the process
(at the expense of owners using the stations) or grant
easements allowing owners to install the stations in
designated common area locations. If the latter, boards
should insist on approving the installation plans and
either select or approve the contractors owners use.

Boards should also require owners to pay for the
electricity used to charge their cars, maintain insurance covering the charging stations, and indemnify
the association for any damages resulting from their
installation, use, or maintenance.

If the board is going to designate parking spots
for electric cars, try to select the least desirable
rather than the most desirable locations, to reduce
friction with other owners.

Poll owners to gauge their support for making the
installation of charging stations a common expense
and repeat the poll periodically. Support for this option
will likely increase as more owners acquire electric cars.

Condo Media - April 2017

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