Newsletter
January 2012
Annual Meeting
The Association’s annual meeting has been scheduled for Friday, February 24, 2012, at 6:30 pm in the Marlin Room at the Pacific Beach Hotel.
Your proxy form is included in this mail out. You can give your proxy to one of the people listed, you can give it to the Board as a whole, or you can write in the name of a person of your choice.
You can also choose to have your proxy count only towards establishing a quorum. Of course, if you attend in person your presence will supersede your proxy.
Since Waikiki Banyan has a high percentage of off-island owners, we urge you to fill out and return your signed proxy in order to help establish a quorum.
Clarification: Lease Rent Catch-up
The letter you received with your January statement was somewhat confusing: I apologize for the lack of clarity.
To simplify, if you or the previous owner of your unit purchased the landowner’s fee interest when it was offered, then you can ignore the information about an additional catch-up payment.
The additional payment only affects the 198 units whose owners did not buy the leased fee interest from Lili‘uokalani Trust.
If you aren’t sure if you should pay the additional 3 months catch-up, you can contact us in the Admin office and we’ll let you know if your unit is one of the 198 that have to pay the additional amount.
Electrical Costs
One of the major expenses the Association faces is the cost of electricity. We have seen the cost per kilowatt hour rise dramatically over the past six months and are now paying close to $100,000 per tower per month for electricity. This escalation is largely responsible for our maintenance fee increase.
While it may seem like a fair expense for the Association on behalf of individual owners, the reality is that in a building like ours electrical usage varies widely among apartments: low usage units end up subsidizing high usage apartments.
If residents are able to reduce their electrical usage, that will help reduce the Association’s expenses. You or your agent can help by asking tenants to pay attention to their energy use and taking simple conservation measures, like turning off the air conditioner and lights when they’re not actually in the unit.
The Association’s lessees have sub-metered their spaces and pay for their electrical use. It may be time for us to think about sub-metering the residential units so that each apartment pays its fair share.
Other condos that have sub-metered apartments have seen overall energy use drop, sometimes dramatically.
Beyond the obvious benefits of sub-metering is the possibility that we could hold or even reduce maintenance fees as a result.
