I wanted to wish you a Happy Holidays. I hope you are all staying warm and will celebrate whatever holiday you celebrate with loved ones and with good cheer.
I wanted to bring to your attention a few updates and announcements:
1) As most of you know, the construction work is complete. However, the city inspection is not complete. As previously unbeknownst to the Board, the inspector will also be inspecting the smoke detectors in all living units as well as communal smoke and CO2 detectors. After conferring with the company that does our annual inspections of our communal smoke detectors, we realized that we need to do two things:
a) We need to update the communal smoke detectors and add CO2 detectors in our boiler rooms and community laundry rooms. We also need to update our control board at the entrance of the building and have it connected automatically to the fire station when the alarm is tripped. This will cost us about $8,000 to do, but cannot be avoided, if we want to pass the inspection.
b) As many of you know, neither the Board, nor the inspectors have ever inspected the living units’ smoke detectors. Today’s code requires us to have our existing wired detector up-to-date and have one in each bedroom (we know that in many cases the detector would be only a couple of feet away from the bedroom, but we can’t fight code. Because this is required to successfully pass the inspection for our $850,000 construction project, and the Board needs to ensure ALL units are up-to-code, Gerry’s has been contracted to come into each unit and replace each wired alarm plus install additional alarms as needed. This is technically a limited common element therefore the cost will be charged back to each unit as applicable, similar to how the dryer vent issue was handled. We were given an estimated cost per unit to be approximately $75.00.
2) After much research and consideration, the Board has decided to switch and go with a new Property Management company. Our new management company will be First Service Residential MN (FSR). They will start with our building maintenance on January 1, 2017 and will take over billing services on February 1, 2017. They will be sending out an introduction letter to us all sometime in early January once transition materials have been sent from Community Partners to FSR, which will give us instruction on the new billing process. For the month of January, please continue to pay the way that you have been. Community Partners will be with us until January 31, 2017. Please join me in thanking John for his services and wishing him well in his future endeavors.
The next Board meeting is January 4, 2017. We will have both FSR introduce themselves and Community Partners wrap up projects, so if you can make it, please attend. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please let me know.
Your President,
Jason