An irrigation main lets go on a Saturday afternoon and water is running across the street. The next board meeting is eleven days out. Somebody has to spend the association's money now.
Most boards handle this fine in the moment and then handle the aftermath badly, because nobody wrote down what just happened or why the person who authorized it was allowed to. The fix is to settle the question while nothing is broken.
Find your spending authority before you need it
Start with the declaration and the bylaws. What you are looking for is any language that lets an officer or the board act between meetings, and any dollar threshold attached to it. Boards commonly find one of three arrangements.
Some documents give an officer, usually the president or the treasurer, authority to commit up to a stated amount without a vote. Some require any expenditure over a threshold to have board approval regardless of urgency, which in practice means a poll of the directors and a documented vote as soon as one can be held. Some say nothing at all, which is the case where the board needs to write a policy.
Whatever your documents say, two limits sit above them. Board authority to act between meetings is not unlimited, and a repair large enough to require a membership vote or a special assessment does not become a board decision because it is urgent. Separately, some states put procedural requirements on how boards make decisions outside an open meeting. Those rules are state-specific, so a board writing this policy should have counsel look at the draft rather than borrowing a neighbor's.
What "emergency" means also belongs in the policy, in narrow words. A useful working definition is a condition that threatens safety, causes ongoing damage, or interrupts an essential service. A component that has been failing slowly for six months is not an emergency, however much it feels like one on the day somebody finally notices.
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Who pays depends on which side of the line the component sits
The money question and the authority question are separate, and boards blur them under pressure.
The association pays for repairs to what the association maintains. If a common-area line broke, that is association money regardless of whose yard it flooded. If the failure was on the owner's side of the meter, it is the owner's repair even when the water ended up on common area. Our post on maintenance responsibilities covers how to settle that line in advance, and the chart it produces is what a board reaches for on a Saturday afternoon.
Get the vendor question settled in advance too. A board calling around at four on a Saturday takes whoever answers, at whatever rate, with no time to check a license or a certificate of insurance. Naming a first-call contractor for each trade before the season, and holding their current paperwork on file, is what keeps an emergency from also becoming an uninsured-vendor problem.
Damage is a third question again. A common-area failure that damages a home is a claims question, not a repair-authority question, and it goes to the carriers rather than to the board's judgment. Our post on the association's insurance covers where the policies divide.
Where the money comes from matters too. Emergency work paid out of operating funds squeezes the rest of the year. Work paid out of reserves has to be for a reserve component and has to be recorded that way, or the reserve study's next update starts from a number nobody can explain. Our post on capital improvement versus maintenance covers which fund pays.
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Ratify it at the next meeting, in the minutes
An emergency repair authorized under a grant the documents already made is valid when it is made. What it does not yet have is a place in the board's own record, and the next meeting is where it gets one.
Put it on the agenda as its own item. State what failed, when, who authorized the work, what the cost was, and which fund it came from. Take a motion to ratify. Attach the invoice and any photos to the record.
This is not paperwork for its own sake. Justia's overview of HOA governance is direct that the duties and powers of the board are described in its bylaws and in state law, so a board acting outside a meeting is acting under a grant it has to be able to point at. Cornell's Legal Information Institute notes that directors of corporations are charged with fiduciary duties, which include the duty of care. A ratification entry in the minutes is the cheapest evidence there is that a board followed its own rules under pressure.
Keep the whole set together. An association running HOA-OS has a document library that holds the invoice, the photos and the minutes rather than leaving them scattered across personal email, which is what makes the record findable two boards later.
Before the next storm season, the board should be able to answer three questions without opening anything: who can authorize a repair between meetings, up to what amount, and which fund it comes out of.