Board Support & Governance Services

Prepare and distribute the agenda and board package in advance, provide the management report and current financials, track action items from the last meeting, attend the meeting, and produce draft minutes afterward. The board still runs its meeting and makes every decision. What changes is that directors arrive briefed instead of hearing the numbers for the first time in the room.

The Illinois Condominium Property Act sets minimum notice requirements for board and owner meetings, and an association’s own bylaws often require more. Notice generally must be posted and delivered to owners in advance, with the annual meeting and any budget or special-assessment meeting carrying their own requirements. Because bylaws vary and the statute is amended regularly, confirm your association’s specific obligations with counsel rather than relying on how it has always been done.

Illinois permits a board to close part of a meeting for a limited set of subjects — litigation, violation hearings, personnel, and matters involving an individual owner’s account among them. The limits matter: closed session is for discussion of those subjects, and votes generally belong in the open portion of the meeting. Treating closed session as a general-purpose private meeting is one of the more common governance mistakes.

Illinois gives owners a right to inspect and copy many association records on proper written request, within a statutory response window and subject to defined exceptions such as litigation files and other owners’ personal information. The safest posture is a documented, consistent process: log the request, confirm receipt in writing, produce what the statute requires within the deadline, and involve counsel on anything genuinely within an exception. Ignoring a records request is how a routine question becomes a lawsuit.

Publish the timeline, solicit candidates, distribute notice and ballots per the bylaws, and use a counting method the association can defend afterward — including the handling of proxies and, if adopted, electronic voting. Keep the ballots and the tally. Most contested elections turn not on the vote itself but on whether the association can show its process was followed.

Yes. The board holds the governing authority, and every contract, expenditure, and policy remains its decision. A management company implements what the board authorizes, keeps the record, and tracks the deadlines. Any firm describing it the other way around is describing something Illinois law does not permit.