Condo Media - July 2020 - 22

Forward Thinking

EMERGING FROM
THE PANDEMIC

MAY BE AS CHALLENGING AS STEERING THROUGH IT

S

Steering their communities through the
COVID-19 pandemic hasn't been easy
for condominium boards and managers.
Navigating in the post-pandemic world
may not be any easier.
Many of the immediate challenges
will be financial. In addition to balancing pandemic-battered budgets (see
feature article on page 16) boards will
have to create new budgets for the
next fiscal year. Should those budgets
anticipate a return of the virus - with all
of the added costs and revenue pressures it has brought - or assume a more
normal financial picture?
Assuming the latter (a more normal
picture), many boards are flagging pandemic-related expenses they incurred
this year, Eric Fudeman, CPA, a partner
in Bloom Cohen Hayes LLC, reports, "so
they don't add in expenses they won't
be seeing next year."
But some communities may not be
able to return quickly to pre-pandemic
cleaning levels because owners' concerns about the virus may persist after
the contagion risks have receded.
"Some owners will expect a much
higher level of sanitation than before,"
Bryan Hughes, New England President
for First Service Residential, notes.
And boards will have to be sensitive to
those concerns. They will also have to
consider the cost of those enhanced
sanitation services.
PERSISTENT GAPS
While the financial pressures many
communities experienced may ease as
lockdowns end and residents return

22

CONDOMEDIA July 2020

to work, budget gaps may persist for
a while because even in a best-case
economic forecast (and we haven't
seen many of those) it is going to take a
while for owners who fell behind in their
association payments to catch up.
"Some owners may be demanding a
30 percent increase in cleaning expenses when revenues have declined by
that much," Hughes notes. Boards, he
suggests, will have to approach budgeting issues "holistically," evaluating
what owners want, what the community
needs, and what the association can reasonably afford. There aren't likely to be
easy answers to any of those questions.
Another difficult question boards
will confront is when to open amenities
closed during the pandemic and how
to manage that process. This is partly
a financial issue - those amenities will
have to be cleaned intensively and
frequently to protect users - but it
also has legal implications. Some
residents will demand immediate and
full access to gyms and other facilities while others may insist that safety
requires limiting access or keeping
the facilities closed, creating damnedif-you-do and damned-if-you-don't
liability risks for boards.
MANAGING LIABILITY RISKS
Association attorneys say boards
can manage these risks by adopting
common-sense procedures and following the guidelines issued by local,
state, and federal authorities. "They
want to come out of the pandemic the
same way they went into it," Thomas

Moriarty, a principal in Moriarty Troyer
& Malloy LLC, advises, "by mirroring
as closely as possible the guidance
issued by commonly accepted authoritative sources."
Because boards have broad discretion to control the common areas, he
thinks it is unlikely that owners who
complain they were denied the use
of amenities for which they are paying
will prevail against a board's argument
that the restrictions imposed were required to protect the health and safety
of residents.
Owners who allege that they were
sickened by using shared equipment
will also have an uphill legal battle,
Moriarty believes. That is partly because it will be difficult to prove with
certainty where an infected individual
was exposed. But it is also because
"boards aren't required to maintain
facilities in a way that guarantees no
one will be infected by using them.
They are only required to take reasonable steps to prevent infection,"
Moriarty emphasizes.
"Boards will be judged by a reasonableness standard," David Uitti, a principal in Mirrione, Shaughnessy & Uitti,
LLC, agrees. And what is reasonable,
he notes, will depend on the nature of
the amenity and on the community's
finances. "A small exercise room may
require a lower occupancy limit than
official guidelines allow," he explains,
while financial constraints might require
a board to keep an amenity closed even
though official guidelines would allow it
to be reopened.



Condo Media - July 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Condo Media - July 2020

Contents
Condo Media - July 2020 - Cover1
Condo Media - July 2020 - Cover2
Condo Media - July 2020 - Contents
Condo Media - July 2020 - 2
Condo Media - July 2020 - 3
Condo Media - July 2020 - 4
Condo Media - July 2020 - 5
Condo Media - July 2020 - 6
Condo Media - July 2020 - 7
Condo Media - July 2020 - 8
Condo Media - July 2020 - 9
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 11
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 15
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 18
Condo Media - July 2020 - 19
Condo Media - July 2020 - 20
Condo Media - July 2020 - 21
Condo Media - July 2020 - 22
Condo Media - July 2020 - 23
Condo Media - July 2020 - 24
Condo Media - July 2020 - 25
Condo Media - July 2020 - 26
Condo Media - July 2020 - 27
Condo Media - July 2020 - 28
Condo Media - July 2020 - 29
Condo Media - July 2020 - 30
Condo Media - July 2020 - 31
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 33
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 35
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 40
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 46
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Condo Media - July 2020 - 48
Condo Media - July 2020 - Cover3
Condo Media - July 2020 - Cover4
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