Riverbank Place is a 32-unit building in Medford, built in 1985. Four floors, center corridor, shared plumbing chases running vertically through the units. The owner of Unit 2C has lived there since 1997 and has smoked in his apartment the entire time. Nobody ever complained, because the unit above him was owned for two decades by a couple who also smoked. That unit sold in March. The new owners of 3C have a seven-year-old with asthma. Since April they have written to the board six times. The smoke comes up through the kitchen chase and around the bathroom pipe penetrations, worst in the evenings. They have taped the baseboards. They run two air purifiers. In August their pediatrician wrote a letter, which they forwarded to the trustees, describing the child's condition and the effect of secondhand smoke exposure. The board has looked at the documents. There is no smoking rule. There is a nuisance provision in the master deed, in the usual wording: no unit shall be used in any manner that constitutes a nuisance or unreasonably interferes with the quiet enjoyment of other units. The owner of 2C has been polite and immovable. He is 71, he has smoked for fifty years, he pays his fees, and his position is that what he does inside his own unit is not the association's business. He has offered to smoke by a window. At the September meeting one trustee proposes the board adopt a building-wide smoking ban by rule, effective immediately. One says a ban cannot be applied to someone who has smoked there for twenty-nine years. The third says this is a medical dispute between two families and the board should encourage them to work it out. DISCUSSION QUESTION Your board is voting next month. Do you adopt a ban, enforce the nuisance clause, or stay out of it - and does the pediatrician's letter change what the board is obligated to do? RECOMMENDED APPROACH The third trustee's instinct is the dangerous one. A documented medical complaint, in writing, to the board, is not a dispute the association can decline to hear.

Most condominium boards elect officers once a year, in about ninety seconds, right after the annual meeting. Someone nominates the person who did it last year, everyone agrees, and the meeting moves on. Then the board spends the next twelve months confused about who decides what. Start with the thing that causes the most trouble. A president is not a boss. Under c. 183A, management is vested in the organization of unit owners, exercised through the trustees acting as a body. Your documents create officer titles and assign duties to them, but no title converts one trustee's opinion into a board decision. A president who signs a contract the board never voted on has not exercised authority. They have created a problem. What the title does carry is agenda and process. The president runs the meeting, sets the agenda with input from the others, keeps discussion to the motion in front of the board, and makes sure everyone is heard before a vote. That is a real job and most boards underrate it. The best presidents talk least. The treasurer is where boards most often confuse a title with a control. The treasurer's job is oversight of the association's finances: reviewing the monthly package, presenting it to the board, leading the budget process, and raising the questions nobody else will. The job is not to be the only person who understands the money, and it is not to be the sole signer on the accounts. A board where one person prepares, approves, signs and reconciles has no financial control at all, however trustworthy that person is - and they are usually entirely trustworthy, which is exactly why nobody questions the arrangement. Split the duties. Have a trustee who cannot move money read the statements each month. The secretary is the most undervalued seat on the board and, in a dispute, the most important. Notice of meetings, minutes, the official record of votes, custody of the governing documents and the association's records. Every one of those becomes evidence when a decision is challenged. A board with a disciplined secretary can prove what it did and why. A board without one is relying on memory.

Ask a board how many people can open the front door, the boiler room, the roof hatch and the electrical closet, and you will usually get a long pause and then a guess. The honest answer in most associations is: more people than anyone knows. Former trustees who never returned their keys. A landscaper from three seasons ago. A plumber's apprentice given the lockbox code for one job in 2023. Fobs belonging to tenants who moved out two leases ago. The code on the side door that has not changed since it was installed. None of that is dramatic until something goes missing from the bike room, a fire door is found propped open, or an insurer asks after a loss who had access. Then it is the whole story. Access control is one of the few security measures a volunteer board fully controls, and it costs very little. Here is the sequence. Start with an inventory. List every way into every part of the building: exterior doors, garage, mechanical rooms, electrical and telecom closets, roof access, storage, laundry, the trash room, the mail room. For each one, record what opens it - a key, a fob, a code, a lockbox - and who currently has that key, fob or code. The last column is where most associations fail, because nobody kept a record. That tells you what you need to build. Keep a key and fob log from now on. Each key or fob gets a number. The log shows who holds it, when it was issued, who authorized it, and when it came back. A signature on issue is enough. The point is that there is a record. Know which keys are master keys and treat them differently. A master key that opens every common door is the most valuable object in the building. Limit how many exist, record every holder by name, and consider a restricted keyway, which prevents copies from being cut at a hardware store. Retrieve access when people leave. Build it into the departure steps for trustees, managers and vendors: keys and fobs back, codes changed, portal access removed. Ex-trustees are the most common gap. Nobody wants to ask a neighbor for their key back, so nobody does.

Most boards put a lot of effort into building their reserve fund and very little into asking where it actually sits. That question matters more than it used to, because many associations now hold reserve balances large enough to run past the limits of deposit insurance without anyone noticing. Start with the rule most trustees have never had explained. Deposit insurance covers a depositor up to $250,000 per bank, per ownership category. A condominium association, whether it is organized as a trust, a corporation or an unincorporated association, generally falls in the category for corporations, partnerships and unincorporated associations. All of the association's deposits at the same bank in that category are added together and insured up to $250,000 in total. That is the part boards get wrong. Opening a separate reserve account at the same bank does not create a second $250,000 of coverage. Your operating account and your reserve account at one bank are combined. An association with $90,000 in operating cash and $480,000 in reserves at a single bank has $570,000 on deposit - and roughly $320,000 of it above the insured limit. Bank failures are rare. They are also not hypothetical, and a reserve fund is exactly the money an association cannot afford to have tied up or at risk while a failed bank is resolved. So the first job is simply to find out. Pull the most recent bank statements for every account, add up the balances by institution, and compare each total to $250,000. Many boards discover the problem in about five minutes. If you are over the limit, there are straightforward options. Spread deposits across banks, keeping each institution's total under the limit. It works, but it multiplies accounts, statements and signers. Use a reciprocal deposit program. Services such as ICS for money market deposits and CDARS for certificates of deposit let an association work with a single bank while its funds are placed across many insured institutions, each under the limit. For most associations this is the simplest way to protect a large reserve balance without managing a dozen banking relationships.

The Massachusetts Legislature's formal session for 2025-2026 ended on July 31. On August 26, the Community Associations Institute published its end-of-session report, after tracking nearly 200 bills that touched community associations over the two-year session. The headline is short: no legislation specifically affecting community associations was enacted this session. That is news in itself. For a board planning 2027, it means the rules you operate under this fall are the rules you already know. But the list of what died is worth reading, because most of it will be refiled when the new session begins on January 1, 2027, and several of these ideas would change how boards work. Here is what was on the table and where it ended up, as CAI reported it. Condominium elections. H. 1539 would have set election procedures, allowed absentee ballots, and prohibited proxy voting. It died with a study order. Think about the last item for a moment - a ban on proxies would change how most associations reach quorum at an annual meeting. A condominium commission. H. 5516 would have created a regulatory commission to oversee associations and required licensing of property managers. It was a late-filed bill, with a hearing scheduled for September 10, and is unlikely to advance. Manager licensing is one of those ideas that comes back. Condo owner rights. S. 980 proposed transparency mandates, an ombudsman office and dispute resolution mechanisms. It was reported favorably by the Housing Committee and sent to Senate Ways and Means, where it is not expected to advance. A study of condominium law. H. 1538 would have created a commission to study condominium governance. It died after a favorable Housing Committee report. Fire sprinklers. S. 1655 and H. 2644 would have required sprinklers in new and altered buildings, and CAI sought to remove retrofit requirements from them. Both were reported favorably but are unlikely to move in the informal session. A separate bill, H. 2586, would have required phased sprinkler installation in pre-1975 high-rise buildings; it died with a study order.