HOA minutes: write down what was decided, not what was said

Two years from now, somebody on your board will need to know exactly what was decided about the fence: who voted, for how much, and on what conditions. Nobody will remember, and the person who took notes will have moved. The minutes are the only answer the association will have.

Most boards get them wrong in one of two ways. Some write a transcript: who said what, every opinion and every aside, pages of it. Others write three lines that say "discussed the fence." Robert's Rules gives the right answer in one line: minutes record what was done, not what was said. Here is a template built on that rule, in the same order as our board meeting agenda, so the secretary fills it in as the meeting goes.

The template

Copy it into a document and fill in the brackets. Delete any section the meeting did not reach.

A filled-in example

Here is the decisions section from a meeting at Maplebrook Commons, the made-up community in our demo:

Notice what is not there: the twenty minutes about whether Greenline was too expensive, who thought the limb could wait until spring, and the joke about the paint color. A reader two years from now needs the decision, the money, the vote and the conditions. Everything else was the meeting, not the record.

What to leave out

• Who said what. A director's opinion in the minutes becomes the association's position in a dispute, and a quote taken down in a hurry is rarely what the person meant.
• Owners' names next to money or violations. Minutes get shared with every owner who asks. Write "one account more than 90 days past due" or "a home on Juniper Gate," and keep the names in the association's own records.
• What a lawyer said. Advice from the association's attorney is normally confidential. Record that the board received legal advice in executive session, not the advice.
• Adjectives. "A heated discussion" and "a productive meeting" age badly. Facts do not.

Votes, conflicts and dissent

Write each motion in the words of the action it takes, with the dollar figure, so nobody has to guess later what "approve the roof" meant. Record the result as a count. When a director asks for their no vote to be recorded, record it by name; some directors want it on the record that they disagreed, and that is their right.

When a director has a stake in a decision, such as a relative's company bidding on the work, the minutes should say the conflict was disclosed and that the director did not vote. Georgia's new Property Owners' Bill of Rights expects directors to tell the rest of the board about a conflict, and the minutes are where that shows. More on Georgia's new HOA law.

Approving and keeping them

Write them up within a few days, while everyone still remembers, and send them to the board marked as a draft. The board approves them at the next meeting, with any corrections, and the corrected version becomes the record. Send the draft to the board only, never to the whole community, because an unapproved draft is not yet the association's minutes.

Then keep them for good, in the same place every time. If your association is incorporated as a Georgia nonprofit, the law requires it to keep minutes of all board and members' meetings as permanent records (O.C.G.A. § 14-3-1601), and members can ask to see three years of the minutes of members' meetings. Other states have similar rules. A folder on the secretary's laptop is not a permanent record; it is a record that ends when the secretary's term does.

How we handle this

In neighborPOP the board packet drafts the agenda in this same order, with the month's real repairs, requests and money already filled in, so the secretary starts with the skeleton of the minutes. Board approvals are recorded on each job, with every director's vote, so the decisions section can be checked against what was approved. And the document library has a Meeting minutes shelf where approved minutes go, so every owner can find them and they stay with the association when the board changes. More on the board packet and the document library.