Hi Daniel,

I am the President of a 111 unit co-op in northern Manhattan. We are not a rich building by any means. A lot of our owners are school teachers.

We pay our Super $19.305 an hour (our union contract rate). Our co-op has a special contract with the Union whereby we pay an additional $0.50 per hour in exchange for a slight relaxation of the Union work rules. We limit his overtime to approximately 7.5% of his pay.

Included in his earnings, we also pay an annual bonus of 7-10 days of pay. He also gets housing and unused sick day payout.

Adding all of this together except the housing, I imagine he makes $52k gross wages including the annual bonus (taxes come out of that, of course). If his basement unit had a rent value of $1,500 a month; this may be an additional $18k of earnings after tax (our maintenance charge on a similar unit is about $875 a month in comparison).

He is in his late 40's or early 50’s and I cannot imagine raising a family on his pay.

Along with open Board meetings, The Board discusses the budget for the upcoming year each December including payroll. This amount also includes a bonus assumption of 10 days per employee. Shareholders are free to attend the annual budget meeting but in truth, few do. We do not announce the bonus amounts when ultimately decided. We encourage the owners to holiday tip the staff as they feel appropriate.

The result of all of this is that we have good employee relations and as the staff treats the owners well, we have fewer owner complaints. As we plan for the bonus when we set the maintenance, the funds are available to pay it out.

To put everything in context, the co-op also has a self amortizing mortgage and our maintenance load is approximately $1.10 per square foot. I am anticipating a small maintenance this year of approximately 3-4%. Complaints on the level of maintenance are very few (one or two owners complain a year).

My view is that owners elect board members to make decisions for them. If they want to know every detail, they would run for election. While transparency is fantastic, one risks losing people’s attention if too much detail is released.

If the building had a policy of not announcing the bonus, and now it does, one unintended consequence is that someone could think there is an effort to “hurt” the financial wellbeing of the staff – i.e. a vendetta. If you want to release this level of fiscal detail, I suggest that you not just do it on the “bonus” budget lines but on all budget lines. That way one does not appear heavy handed or spiteful.

Good luck!