The Hamer lease is, in true DHHS style, taking an absolute age to bring to the point of signing. This is frustrating. The Dept will send us a draft lease next week for our consideration. It will be a great relief when the lease is finally signed.
Category Archives: Leases
Council and the Hamer lease.
On Monday evening Warren and I attended the Boroondara Council meeting where the issue of the future of the Hamer Court lease was dealt with. Councilors unanimously voted in favor of accepting Council officers recommendation that they be allowed to finalize the lease with the Dept. It was all very straightforward – but still very gratifying to see all the hands be raised!
If we are not quite ‘done and dusted’ we are most certainly well on the way! When all signed, sealed and delivered the new lease will take us from 1/7/2015 thru 30/6/2020.
BTW – if anyone wants to see a meeting run with chilling efficiency I suggest you go to a Council meeting. They are brutal affairs!!
Aldous Huxley
Today is Day 1 of the Brave New World of Servants operating under Option 2 of the HPF Lease. Interesting times ahead to be sure!!
Meeting with Dept
I met with the Dept this arvo for discussions in regards to progressing Servants towards the General Lease and to ascertain their thoughts in regards the possibility of signing another lease with Boroondara Council for Hamer. There was nothing but good news! With regards to both issues there is nothing signed, sealed or delivered right now -but we should feel very confident going forwards with both projects.
General Lease
An increasing amount of time is currently being invested into looking at the General Lease for Carrical and what we need to do to be in a position to sign this off. There are several steps involved in this process – one of which will be ensuring that Committee is abreast of all relevant information in time for important decisions to be made at the May committee meeting. In a nutshell everything appears to be on track right now – we have had a comprehensive property condition report carried out at Carrical, have met with the Dept, have informed the Registrar of our General Lease intentions and have started to timeline all the other pieces of work that are required to ensure we are ready to sign the General Lease.
As a footnote to this it is reasonable to say that the Dept is currently in a greater state of chaos than usual. People are disappearing from their positions there on a daily basis. My confidence in the Dept is at an all time low.
Property Condition Report
As we approach the signing (or otherwise) of the General Lease for the next 5 years at Carrical from 1st July 2014 I can report that we have hired the services of Steve Skurnik to undertake a full condition report of Carrical.
This report will be ready for viewing and consideration by the committee at the upcoming 10th February committee meeting.
Steve Skurnik is the architect involved in the Romana renovations.
CHFOV update on the Standard Lease 6th Dec 2013
CHFOV held a workshop on Friday with speakers from various groups that have adopted the general lease.
All of them have adopted the lease and believe they are better off on it. They also talked about the problem and opportunity areas:
- the elephant in the room – UNFUNDED PROPERTY LIABILITIES.
- Insurance for the property – the department currently “self-insures”.
- Grey areas about total loss and the definition of uninhabitable.
- Less regulatory reporting – e.g. CCB reporting disappears, some reporting move to 6 monthly as well.
- Maintenance backlog when we take it on.
- structural assessments needed.
We will need to convince the regulator that we can complete the required asset management. This is not trivial.