Every Friday our building manager sends all board members and our counsel a recap of the week’s activities and events. Included are all letters from residents and all letters to residents. The monthly trial balance and income and expense statements are included as available; likewise the list of arrears is provided. Results of inspections are noted. Board members may also provide items for fellow board members.

Of note is that the board members do not charge dinners to the coop corporation. Yes, we meet, four board meetings a year and about four to eight workshops for board members. But, if we go out to the dinner, it is either share the bill or one board member picks up the tab, not the coop.

Yes, there are occasional working lunches and well have sandwiches brought to the board room. Similarly, for a workshop, we may have sandwiches provided.

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Across the years we have made many large scale capital improvements, but we have also made improvements not too evident to the residents. We do not wish to store our compacted trash outside and invite vermin. So we have chilled our compactor room and our trash storage room to reduce the heat of the trash and thereby reduce the generation of odors.

We replaced our aircraft warning lights (we are a high rise) with LED devices so that we need not send someone to the roof every few weeks to check on the bulbs and then have someone replace the bulbs. The LEDs last ten years – yes more expensive but there’s a cost benefit.

Our larger generator now supports emergency lighting in our emergency stairwells ands in our parking garage, as well as some lights in every hallway.

We replaced our original fresh water pumps that raise water to our roof top storage tanks with high quality vertical pumps from Norway or Sweden. We went with the best ands slightly oversized them to avoid future maintenance and replacement woes.

We added lighting to some dimly lit areas outside the perimeter of the building.

When we rebuilt our mailroom, we added parcel lockers for the convenience of the residents. I tried to have the postal service do home delivery, and I was even going to buy the postman an electric cart to deliver to each door, but I was turned down by the postal service.

We have had our roof infra red scanned, which is why we know we need to replace the roof next year.

For many years, we already used fluorescent bulbs (as replacements for incandescent bulbs) throughout the building. Now we have equipped many areas, save hallways, with motion detectors.

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As I think of more, I’ll add to the narrative.

Also see:

500 unit coop in NJ and committees +