Pamela Dittmer Mckuen

Spring is here, and another construction season begins. Community associations will hire truckloads of contractors to repair and improve their buildings and grounds. How do you find the right people...

According to the community association calendar, it's time for the springtime ritual known as the walk-through. That's when boards and grounds committees convene, probably on a weekend morning, equipped with...

Board members at every community association have myriad responsibilities, but board members at self-managed associations have more. They've got to figure out what needs to be done, do it and...

What are community association residents and board members thinking about? Money. They want to know how to get it, how to spend it and how not to lose it. That's...

Electric cars are speeding into the Chicago marketplace. This year, the battery-powered Nissan Leaf and battery-gasoline hybrid Chevrolet Volt will be introduced for sale at local dealerships. Others will soon...

Community associations are handy targets for fraud, theft and embezzlement. Some associations have multimillion-dollar annual budgets. Others are sitting on huge piles of money, amassed in anticipation of major replacement...

Here's another expense community associations need to add to their budgets: bedbug inspections. Long believed to be almost extinct, these pesky little night-biters have returned with a vengeance and are...

Cold winds blew in another year, and with it came new challenges and hard decisions for community associations. What's in store for 2011? With some help from several industry frontliners,...