Speaking at the June meeting of Waterford Metropolitan District Council, Councillor Joe Kelly has claimed that the local authority has effectively abandoned council tenants living in the Mount Suir apartment blocks.
Mount Suir hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons in March when a glass panel gave way and two children, aged 3 and 7, fell from a first-floor balcony.
The tenants were living in social housing in a Council-owned property. Normally, this would confer certain standards and expectations on the council, but according to Cllr Kelly, the Council is unable to maintain or make changes to the property due to a controlling committee known as the OMC or Owners Management Company.
In Ireland all apartment blocks must have an OMC in place, which among other responsibilities, must maintain the common areas. The owner of each residential unit should get a place on the OMC. According to Cllr Kelly, one owner in Mount Suir owns about 50 apartments, giving them a controlling majority which prevents the Council from making necessary interventions.
“From what I can see we are completely hamstrung as a council to service or deal with issues in any of the Mount Suir apartments where we have tenants,” said Cllr Kelly.
“There are all kinds of rules and conditions, we seem to have no influence at all. There’s a main property owner there that has something like 50 odd units, so they control that committee.
“As far as I can establish the committee consists simply of a chair and a secretary, we [the council] have nobody on it. Even though we have quite a number of units up there. And I’m being told we can’t do any work for any of the people that are our tenants, so they are hugely disadvantaged compared to any of our other tenants in the City and County,” he said.
“The condition of some of the apartments is shocking. An individual there again last week had something fall on top of them. In the weeks before that he was injured when he fell over floorboards that were raised.
“Our people tell us we can do nothing about it; we have to go through this OMC. I’m asking how do we get out of that structure? It may have been set up nationally or whatever, but it is the greatest disaster I can see. I don’t know why we ever came into it. It’s a completely flawed system.
“And we are abandoning the people in Mount Suir apartments,” he added.
The short reply to this query came from Senior Architect Walter Holden.
“No, you cannot get out of an OMC,” he replied.
“It is a Statutory requirement. There is a workshop at the end of the month for all councillors about OMCs, which we have organised. There is a lot of good information in that, which you’ll pick up,” he added.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme AARON KENT
