Motions and Election of Officers

I'm an Officer on our Board. My question is: When a motion is being made and I don't want to vote for or against it at the time, can I reserve my right to vote on that motion until a later time? Do I need a majority of the Board to agree to have me reserve my right?

My next question is that once our elections are held and the new Board goes on to appoint the new directors, can the newly appointed board go behind "closed doors" to appoint and President, Vice-President and Treasurer?

Thanks for your help with these questions.

Nadine,

If your not ready to vote, you may make a motion that the vote be postponed until the next meeting. That motion if seconded, will then be voted on. If successful, the vote can take place when your ready to vote.

The other option is to abstain from voting. However, abstaining can have the same result as a nay vote. This is because if you abstain and the vote is a tie, then the motion failed to pass.

In my opinion, executive sessions (closed doors) should not be used for the appointment of offices. However, FL 720.303 specifies that executive sessions can be used for personnel matters. Therefore, I suspect that a board could conclude that assigning officers would be a personnel matter.

Note: entering into executive session should be from an open session and any voting/actual appointing of officers should be done in the open session (using the executive session to just discuss the issue).

Hope this helps,

Tim

Nadine,

No, you may not reserve the right to vote at a later time. Proper parliamentary procedure requires that members vote (or abstain) when the motion is "put" to a vote by the president. One cannot later change his or her vote or the fact that he or she abstained. You can, however, move that consideration of the motion be postponed until you have had an opportunity to study the issue further, as Tim suggested. Such a motion must be made before the first vote is taken. If the motion to postpone is sustained (agreed upon by the majority) then the original motion is postponed to the next meeting, or such later time as agreed upon. At that time it is brought up again under "unfinished business", debated, and voted on. If the motion to postpone is not sustained, debate and vote on the original motion continues. You must then decide to either vote "yea" or "nay", or abstain. You do not have to explain your reasons.

I assume when you say "appoint directors" you really mean appoint officers, since the directors are usually elected by the association members and it is the directors who usually appoint the officers. There really is no need to do this in executive session since the officers eventually have to be made known to the association members anyway. Furthermore, I would expect that most states that regulate HOAs and corporations would not regard the appointment of officers as a valid reason for going into executive session.