🏘️ Our colony committee elections turned into a proper drama this year

Every year our residents' welfare committee election in Malakpet used to be a quiet affair, three or four people putting their names forward and everyone agreeing within a week. This year it turned into something else entirely. Two groups formed, one backing the current treasurer who has held the post for six years, and another pushing for a complete new committee, and suddenly there were WhatsApp broadcasts, printed pamphlets slid under doors, and even a loudspeaker announcement one evening that half the colony found unnecessary. The actual disagreement, once you strip away the noise, comes down to how the maintenance fund has been spent over the past two years. Some residents want a proper account statement shown at a general meeting, others feel that request itself is an accusation and are offended by it. My own building's secretary got pulled into this because our lane happens to sit right between the two groups geographically, and now he is fielding calls from both sides asking him to "just say something" at the meeting. What genuinely surprised me was how much energy people who otherwise never attend any colony event suddenly found for this particular election. There was a meeting last Sunday that ran almost three hours, mostly people repeating the same points louder each time, and by the end nothing was actually resolved, just a promise to meet again next weekend. I have lived here for eleven years and never seen it get this heated over what is, at the end of the day, an unpaid volunteer position nobody particularly wants once the drama settles down. Part of me wonders if this happens everywhere once a colony reaches a certain size and enough money starts passing through a shared account each month. Has anyone else's residents' association gone through something like this? Curious whether it eventually settles down on its own or if it just repeats every election cycle once the precedent is set.

Hope this actually gets resolved properly at the next scheduled meeting rather than just repeating the exact same three hour cycle all over again without anything new. These situations rarely get better simply by people talking more loudly at each other, usually needs some kind of neutral third party or a genuinely clear process instead, and I genuinely hope whoever leads that next meeting keeps things constructive this time.

Our building specifically avoids this by simply rotating the treasurer role every single year regardless of performance, nobody ever gets to accumulate enough time in the position for real suspicion to genuinely build up the way it clearly has in your specific case. It occasionally means a slightly less experienced person handles the books that particular year, but the tradeoff has genuinely been worth it overall.

Some kind of fixed term limit for these specific positions might genuinely help prevent this exact situation from building up so intensely in the first place, six years in one same role without any real rotation naturally invites this kind of scrutiny and suspicion eventually, regardless of how well or fairly that person may have actually managed things the whole time.

The specific irony of an unpaid volunteer position nobody particularly wants once the initial drama actually settles down generating this much genuine heat and energy is honestly not lost on me either. People clearly care more about the process and principle involved here than about who actually holds the specific position itself once the dust eventually settles on the whole thing.

Once real money and any kind of shared community fund is genuinely involved, this exact kind of drama becomes almost inevitable eventually in most communities I have personally seen or heard about, even among otherwise fairly reasonable and normally pretty calm people. The specific amount involved almost never seems to matter as much as the principle everyone suddenly feels the need to defend once it starts.

Three hours resulting in absolutely nothing resolved sounds exhausting purely to read about, let alone actually having to sit through it in person. Sometimes these meetings genuinely need a much more structured agenda with an actual strict time limit per specific speaker, otherwise it just becomes the same handful of loud voices repeating themselves louder each time without any real progress made.

An independent auditor, even a fairly informal and low cost one, reviewing just the past two years specifically in question might actually settle this faster than repeated three hour meetings ever will on their own. A neutral, documented, and genuinely factual answer removes most of the actual room for ongoing dispute. Worth proposing that specific option directly at the next meeting rather than letting another three hour session repeat.

Your building secretary getting pulled into this purely because of where his lane happens to sit geographically, rather than any personal involvement on his part, seems like a genuinely unfair position to be placed in by circumstances beyond his own control. Hopefully both sides eventually recognize that and stop specifically pressuring him to take a side he clearly never actually wanted.

Our own colony went through something fairly similar about three years back, and it eventually got resolved once a genuinely neutral third resident, someone with no clear allegiance to either specific side, agreed to review the actual account books and simply report the plain findings back to everyone. Having that neutral voice specifically made a real difference in calming things down.

Treating a simple request for a proper account statement as some kind of personal accusation rather than completely standard financial practice is honestly the part that would concern me most if I were living in your colony, a transparent committee genuinely should not react defensively to a reasonable request. That kind of reaction alone would genuinely make me question what specifically they might be trying to avoid showing everyone.

A loudspeaker announcement over what is essentially an internal colony committee dispute does feel like a genuine escalation beyond what the actual situation probably called for, though I understand tempers clearly ran high enough by that point that normal channels like WhatsApp broadcasts alone no longer felt sufficient. Once things reach that point, it usually means the actual underlying issue has been left unresolved for far too long already.