It is a condominium Board's responsibility to ensure that annual corporation's budget is fully covered by condo fees including reserve allocation (no deficit, no surplus). If the Board feels incompetent to manage the budget themselves, they may (not obligated) hire a professional condominium property manager to do it for them and report budget recommendations, which the Board can dispute, discuss, revise and/or approve. Additionally, Condominium Property Act of Alberta requires professionally-prepared condominium reserve studies conducted periodically to the Board identifying the large items that require accumulation of funds to replace (windows, siding, roofs etc.).
Special assessments are never ludicrous. Most of the times, they are a result of one or a few of the following:
- Legitimate defects that could not have been reasonably identified by the reserve fund study (i.e. black mold developed in the wooden structure, those cost portions of emergency damages due to fires, flood, accidents not covered by insurance etc.);
- Board's over-zealousness in protecting the amount of condo fees and ignoring reserve fund study recommendations;
- Boards' stupidity in not recognizing the need for a reputable professional property manager;
- Significant market shifts resulting in drastically increased costs of replacements identified in a reserve fund (i.e. asphalt shingles replacements due in 2006-07 were astronomically higher due to the increased price of oil etc.)
$2.1M special assessment on a small-size condo building does seem very high and was likely caused by something very serious. But it is your right as a homeowner to challenge your Board on this. You should talk to your neighbourts and call for a special general meeting, unless there was one and you ignored or missed the notice. Your rights at this meeting are limited to questioning the Board for their reasoning of this assessment. If you and enough others disagree with the Board you can cause the special resolution passing and take further steps (this is where you HAVE to read your ByLaws to see the actual % votes required to do so). You can also sue the Board as a homeowner and request a review of the Board's decision, but this is expensive and unless it made a decision in gross negligence, your chances of winning are miniscule.
In general, once the special resolution is passed, this is it, you are on the hook for costs.
Compare this situation with a house you bought from someone and had a house inspection done. Then, after one year you've discovered that there's mold in the attic and bathroom walls. Here's $50,000 bill right there and nobody to blame (house inspectors always put million disclaimers in their reports about this stuff). Sucks, yes. But what do you do, right...