Downsizing to a Dunnville condo meant inheriting someone else's board fight

The situation

The plan had been simple. Meron and Nadira sold the house they had raised their kids in and bought a two-bedroom unit in a mid-sized condo building in Dunnville, priced in the high 600,000s, close to the small electrical contracting business Meron still ran with two employees and had no intention of fully retiring from anytime soon. Nadira had worked for years as an insurance adjuster before cutting back her hours, and the move was meant to trade yard work, gutter cleaning, and a set of stairs that were becoming harder on Meron's knees for a lock-and-leave lifestyle while he kept the business going a few more years and she picked up occasional consulting work in her old field.

They closed on the unit in the spring and spent the first few months settling in, meeting neighbours over the mailboxes, and getting used to condo living after decades in a detached house, from the monthly fees to the visitor parking rules to the general rhythm of shared hallways. It was at a casual hallway conversation with another owner, not anything the board or property manager proactively told them, that they first heard something was wrong. The board, they learned, had approved a special assessment several months earlier to cover unexpected repair costs, and separately had approved a change to how the reserve fund was being topped up going forward, both at meetings that several longtime owners said had been poorly notified and thinly attended by the board's own directors.

Meron, with the methodical instincts of someone who had spent thirty years reading electrical permits and inspection reports, pulled the minutes from the property manager's online portal himself rather than taking the hallway account at face value. The minutes for the meeting that approved the special assessment recorded only two of the board's five directors present. The bylaws, like most condominium bylaws, set a quorum requirement for board meetings, a majority of the directors, so that a decision of this size could not effectively be made by one director talking a second one into agreeing. Two did not meet that threshold. Neither did the meeting where the reserve fund change was approved two months later, with the same two directors recorded as the only ones present out of the same five-person board. Both sets of minutes also showed the notice sent to owners afterward had gone by email to a contact list nobody had updated in over a year, meaning most of the building never had a real chance to know a decision affecting their finances had even been made.

A third owner, Rabia, who had lived in the building for close to a decade, had been raising the same concern informally for weeks and had been told by the board chair that the numbers were 'close enough' and that revisiting the decisions would delay repairs the building genuinely needed before another winter. Meron and Nadira, newer to the building but with Meron's business background in reading contracts and permits and Nadira's insurance experience in scrutinizing documentation for exactly this kind of gap, found that explanation unconvincing and came to us before the next installment of the special assessment came due.

The problem

Under the Condominium Act, 1998, a special assessment is levied by the board of directors, and how much gets contributed to the reserve fund going forward is set by the board through the annual budget and the reserve fund study — owners do not vote on either one directly. What owners are entitled to is a board that actually meets to make that decision, with enough directors present to constitute the board properly, and notice once the decision is made. Quorum requirements for board meetings exist precisely so that a small, unrepresentative slice of the board itself cannot bind the whole ownership to significant financial obligations without at least a majority of the people entrusted to make that call actually turning their minds to it.

When board quorum is not met, the meeting generally cannot validly transact the business on its agenda, even if everyone present votes unanimously in favour and the outcome seems, on its face, entirely sensible. This is not a technicality the board can waive after the fact just because the result feels reasonable in hindsight. The whole point of a quorum requirement is that directors who were not in the room did not get a meaningful chance to weigh in before money was committed on the ownership's behalf, and a decision made without them has a real defect in how it was reached, not merely a paperwork problem that can be quietly corrected later. Separately, owners themselves were entitled to proper notice once each decision was made, and sending it to a contact list nobody had checked in over a year fell short of that too.

For Meron and Nadira, the practical stakes were the special assessment itself, which worked out to several thousand dollars per unit and would need to be paid within a set number of months, and the reserve fund change, which would increase their monthly condo fees on an ongoing basis for years to come. But the deeper problem, as we explained it to them, was precedent. If a board could pass major financial decisions without enough of its own directors in the room and treat objections as delay tactics rather than legitimate concerns, the pattern would likely repeat on the next significant expense, and owners like Meron and Nadira, who had just moved in and had little institutional standing or long history in the building, would keep absorbing costs decided by a fraction of the board, without even proper notice, year after year.

The board's informal defence, that revisiting the decisions would delay needed repairs, was not without some force, and we did not dismiss it out of hand. The building did have real maintenance issues that several owners, including Rabia, independently confirmed, and nobody disputed that money needed to be raised eventually to address them properly. The question was not whether repairs were needed but whether a board that had never properly convened to decide on them could bind the ownership regardless, or whether the board had to go back and make the decision properly, with enough directors in the room and real notice to owners, even if that meant a modest delay to work that had already waited this long.

What we did

1. Reviewed the condominium's bylaws and the minutes for both contested meetings, rather than relying on the hallway account or the board chair's own assurance that the numbers were close enough. Confirming the specific quorum requirement set out in the bylaws, and comparing it precisely against the attendance figures recorded in the minutes, gave us a clear factual basis to work from, arithmetic rather than opinion, and it told us exactly how far short of quorum each meeting had actually fallen before we sent a single letter.
2. Sent a written notice to the board identifying two defects: the board itself had not met with quorum when it approved either decision, and the notice sent to owners afterward had gone to a contact list nobody had checked in over a year. Framing the letter around the specific bylaw provision, the exact director attendance recorded in the minutes, and the required threshold made it difficult for the board to dismiss the concern as a matter of opinion or interpretation rather than plain arithmetic, and it put the board on formal notice that both decisions were vulnerable to challenge if they were not properly redone.
3. Coordinated with Rabia and other owners who had already raised concerns informally. A single owner's objection is easier for a board to minimize as one person's complaint than a documented group of owners raising the same concern together, so we helped organize a joint letter with several signatories representing units across different floors of the building, which made clear the objection was not one newcomer couple stirring up trouble but a shared concern with real support across the ownership.
4. Requested that the board reconvene, with enough directors present to meet quorum, to remake both decisions properly, and that it give owners real notice and a chance to attend and ask questions before doing so. Rather than starting with a formal legal proceeding, which would have been slower and more adversarial, we asked for the more direct remedy first, since a board acting in reasonably good faith, once shown a clear procedural defect, will often prefer to fix it than spend money defending it.
5. Advised Meron on how to structure his time around the dispute given his business commitments. Because he could not pause the electrical business, its service calls, or its two employees to attend every meeting or return every call personally, we identified which steps genuinely needed his direct involvement and which we or Nadira could handle on his behalf, so the matter did not stall waiting on his availability between jobs.
6. Prepared a summary memo for the ownership explaining the quorum problem in plain terms. Many owners did not understand why director attendance at a board meeting mattered, or why a contact list nobody had updated was a real defect and not a technicality, and a memo full of legal language would have gone straight in the recycling; a short, accessible explanation, distributed with the meeting notice, helped far more owners show up and ask questions than either of the contested meetings had managed, which mattered less for validity, since that only ever turned on the board's own quorum, than for making sure the board actually heard from the people who would be paying before it decided the assessment's final scope.
7. Attended the reconvened meeting to confirm the board itself had quorum this time and that notice had actually reached every owner. Having someone present who understood the specific requirement, and could speak up immediately if the meeting drifted off procedure, reduced the real risk of a second defect undermining the redo, since a flawed second attempt would have meant starting the whole process over, a delay the building's repair timeline could not easily absorb.
8. Followed up in writing after the meeting to confirm the results were properly recorded. We asked the property manager to circulate corrected minutes reflecting the directors' attendance and the board's votes, so there would be no ambiguity later about whether the reconvened meeting had met every procedural requirement, and so any future owner questioning the reserve fund change or the assessment would find a clean, defensible record rather than the same kind of dispute starting over again.

The outcome

The board reconvened roughly ten weeks after Meron and Nadira first raised the issue, with all five directors present this time and proper written notice sent to all forty-plus units well in advance, including a plain-language explanation of why the meeting was necessary. Close to half the building's owners came to the open session that followed, well beyond what either contested meeting had drawn, and the board reaffirmed the reserve fund change largely as originally proposed, since most owners who attended and heard the full explanation agreed the reserve genuinely needed strengthening after years of minimal contributions. The special assessment, however, was revised downward after several owners questioned parts of the original repair scope in the open session, and the board exercised its own discretion to phase a portion of the work over two years instead of raising the full amount from every owner at once.

For Meron and Nadira, this counted as a clear win, not because every number changed in their favour, but because the process itself was fixed and the outcome reflected genuine input from a representative slice of the ownership rather than a handful of habitual attendees. The reduced and phased assessment also eased the immediate cash pressure on owners who, like them, had just closed on their units and had little appetite or spare capacity for a large unplanned bill in their first year of condo living.

Meron told us afterward that the business had made the timeline harder to manage than the legal issue itself; between service calls, he was often drafting emails from the cab of a work truck between jobs, snatching a few minutes here and there. Having a clear division of what genuinely needed his personal attention, such as signing the joint letter and attending the final meeting, versus what we or Nadira could carry day to day, such as drafting correspondence and tracking responses, let the matter move forward steadily without requiring him to step away from the business he was not ready to leave. Nadira, drawing on years of reading insurance files closely, became the one who kept the paper trail organized throughout.

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