In August we covered the legal half of this: under the Massachusetts right-to-charge provisions, an owner's application to install charging equipment in their own space is deemed approved if the board does not deny it within sixty days. This is the other half, and it is the one boards cannot do in sixty days. Whether your building can physically support the chargers people are going to ask for. The answer is not obvious and it is not optional. A board that approves four chargers without knowing its electrical capacity may be authorizing an overload, and a board that denies a request on vague capacity grounds it never measured has a weak position. Either way the fix is the same: get the number. GET THE LOAD CALCULATION Start with what service the building actually has. The size of the main service, the house panel capacity, and how much of it is already committed. Then have a licensed electrician or electrical engineer perform a real load calculation - not an estimate from someone standing in the garage. You want a written document stating existing demand, spare capacity, and how many Level 2 chargers that capacity supports. That document is the single most useful thing a board can hold on this subject. It answers owner requests, it supports a denial if one is genuinely necessary, and it tells you what an upgrade would cost before anyone asks. DECIDE THE ARCHITECTURE NOW There are three broad paths, and choosing early is much cheaper than choosing later. Individual circuits run from each owner's own unit panel. Cleanest on billing, because the electricity is already on the owner's meter, which is also what the statute contemplates. Limited by whether a route exists from the unit panel to the space and by the capacity of that panel. A dedicated EV subpanel fed from house power, with submetering. Works where unit panels cannot reach the garage. Requires the association to meter and bill usage, and to decide who pays for the infrastructure. Load management, sometimes called an energy management system, which lets several chargers share limited capacity by throttling or sequencing. This is frequently what makes a building workable without a service upgrade, and most boards have never heard of it.

A supply line fails in Unit 12 on a Sunday. Water reaches four units and the corridor. The adjuster totals the loss at $94,000, the master policy responds, and the association receives a check for $69,000. The missing $25,000 is the deductible. Somebody has to pay it, and in most associations nobody has decided who before the day it happens. That question is now larger than it used to be. Secondary market standards allow a master policy per-unit deductible of up to $50,000, and in a hardening market plenty of boards accepted a higher deductible in exchange for a lower premium - often without working through the consequence. A higher deductible is not a saving. It is a transfer of risk from the premium to whoever ends up paying the deductible. So who does pay? The answer is in your governing documents, and there are three patterns. Some documents say the deductible is a common expense. All owners pay it through the budget or a special assessment, regardless of where the water started. Clean to administer, and it means a careless owner's failed washing machine hose is funded by their neighbors. Some documents authorize the association to charge the deductible, or the uninsured portion of a loss, back to the unit where the loss originated - sometimes limited to cases of negligence, sometimes not. These provisions vary enormously in wording and in how far they reach. And many older Massachusetts documents are simply silent. Silence is not neutral. In practice it generally means the association absorbs it as a common expense, because the board has no documented authority to charge it to anyone else. A board that assesses an owner anyway, without that authority, is inviting a challenge it will probably lose. So the first job is not a policy decision. It is reading your master deed and bylaws, with counsel, and finding out which of the three you have. Do it now rather than during a claim. Then do four things. Confirm the actual deductible on your current policy, per occurrence and per unit, and write it where the board will see it - in the budget, next to the insurance line. Trustees who approved a deductible increase two renewals ago frequently cannot state the number today.

This one is already in force and most boards have not heard about it, which is why it is worth the space. When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac overhauled their condominium requirements this year - Lender Letter LL-2026-03, announced March 18 - the reserve and project review changes got all the attention. We covered those: Limited Review retired on August 3, and the reserve floor rises to 15 percent on January 4. Buried in the same package were changes to what the master property insurance policy has to cover. Two of them matter. First, the headline. The master policy must provide replacement cost coverage for everything except the roofs. Roofs must still be insured, but replacement cost basis is no longer required, which means actual cash value coverage on a roof is now acceptable. Second, the requirement that associations carry inflation guard coverage has been eliminated. Read both of those as what they are: the floor moved down, not the standard. Nothing requires your association to accept less coverage. What changed is that a carrier can now offer a policy with an actual cash value roof, or without inflation guard, and it will still satisfy the secondary market. The protection that used to be effectively mandatory is now optional, and optional coverage is the kind that quietly disappears at renewal while the premium looks better. Here is why the roof change is the one to act on. Replacement cost pays what it costs to replace the roof today. Actual cash value pays that figure minus depreciation for the age and remaining life of the roof. On a twenty-year-old asphalt roof, the gap between those two numbers is enormous - and it lands on the association as an uninsured shortfall at the worst possible moment, after a storm, when the roof is already open. Then do the arithmetic that follows. A large ACV shortfall on a roof is funded one of three ways: the reserve fund, a special assessment, or a loan. Every one of those is worse than having carried replacement cost coverage.

Chiswick Court is a 44-unit building in Brighton, built in 1974, with a surface lot holding 38 spaces. The arrangement, as best anyone can reconstruct it: 20 spaces were conveyed with specific units in the master deed. Another 16 were assigned by boards over the years as exclusive-use spaces, mostly in the order people asked. Two are painted GUEST. The manager keeps a spreadsheet of who parks where, started in 2011 by a manager who left in 2016. Three things landed on the board this fall. The owner of Unit 31 has multiple sclerosis and has asked for the space closest to the ramped entrance. That space is currently used by the owner of Unit 9, who has parked there for twenty-two years, is 78, and has said no. The owner of Unit 22, who bought in 2024, has learned that the space they believed came with their unit is a board assignment rather than a deeded space. They are upset, and they are asking the board to "fix the deed." And owners have been using both guest spaces as overflow for about two years. There is no written parking rule, no signage beyond the painted word, and no towing policy. At the October meeting a trustee proposes the obvious-sounding fix: reshuffle the whole lot, publish a new assignment list, and tow anyone in a guest space. DISCUSSION QUESTION Your board is about to vote on that reshuffle. What has to happen before any space moves - and which of these three problems is the board actually able to solve? RECOMMENDED APPROACH Stop the reshuffle. The board does not yet know what it owns, and until it does, every reassignment is a guess with a deed behind it. Start with the only question that matters first: what is the legal character of each space? There are three possibilities and the board's power is completely different for each. A space conveyed with a unit in the master deed is that owner's property interest. The board cannot reassign it, cannot swap it, and cannot regulate it away. Twenty of these spaces are in that category. A space held as exclusive-use common area, assigned by the board, is a different animal. Whether the board can reassign it depends on what your documents say about the power to make and change those assignments. Some trusts grant it plainly. Some are silent, which is its own problem.

Annual meeting season is underway, which means a lot of Massachusetts associations have just seated someone new. In most buildings that person now receives exactly two things: a congratulations, and the date of the next meeting. They then spend six months guessing - voting on matters they have no background for, learning the documents by accident, and discovering in month four that a policy they assumed existed does not. That is not the new trustee's failure. It is an onboarding failure, and it takes about ninety minutes to fix. THE PACKET Give every new trustee the same set of documents, in the association's own document system rather than as email attachments. The governing documents: master deed, declaration of trust, bylaws, rules and regulations, and every recorded amendment. Not a summary. The actual documents, because every real question this year will be answered out of them. The money: the current adopted budget, the last twelve months of financial statements, the most recent reserve study, and the most recent audit, review or compilation. The risk picture: all current insurance policies with the declarations pages, including the directors and officers policy. The commitments: the management agreement and a list of every vendor contract with its term, renewal date and annual value. The history: minutes from the last twenty-four months. This is the item most often skipped and the most useful. Two years of minutes tell a new trustee what the building has been arguing about, what was decided and why. And the board's own adopted policies, if you have them - delegation of authority and spending thresholds, collections, enforcement and fines, records retention, reserve investment, electronic meetings. If that list is mostly empty, you have just found this year's agenda. THE CONVERSATION Then sit down for an hour, with the president and ideally the manager. Walk through what the board decides versus what the manager handles, including the dollar thresholds. Walk through the year: when the budget gets adopted, when the annual meeting falls, which inspections and filings land in which month. Cover the open matters - active or threatened litigation, delinquent accounts, insurance claims, anything with a deadline - and be explicit that some of it is confidential and why.