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YOU FINALLY PAY THE PRICE!!!!
By
Jan Bergemann
Published July 30, 2021
With the
Florida legislature watering down the initially demanded
mandatory funding of full reserves by allowing owners to vote
down the budgeted reserves, it was easy for owners to circumvent
the payment for reserves – and many did. Especially the owners
living in older hi-rises in South Florida are now paying the
price. The government is cracking down on the old buildings,
making sure that all safety-requirements are met, after the
catastrophe in Surfside. We have seen in the last few weeks many
reports about condo buildings being red-tagged and the owners
evacuated. And as it turns out, most all of these associations
don’t have any reserve funds worth discussing.
Not only
will these owners have to find places to live until the problems
are fixed and owners allowed to move back in, they will as well
face steep special assessments in order to pay for the necessary
repairs.
And I am
pretty sure that some families will lose their homes after being
foreclosed upon because they were unable to pay the special
assessment – something we have often seen happening in the past.
And we
need reserve-studies done by licensed experts, naming all
required funds, not only the ones considered beautification. A
“reserve study” shouldn’t be done by the board president who
feels like he can save the association $10,000.00.
As we all
know: Every home needs maintenance and repairs, no matter if
it’s a single-family home or a unit in a hi-rise condo. And you,
as the owner, will have to pay for it. That’s an undeniable fact
of life!
Don’t you
think that it may better to pay about $100 (?) more monthly with
the regular maintenance fees than face one day a huge special
assessment, or get kicked out of your home because the building
was red-tagged – or even worse?
Well, I
know what some of you will have to say: Our board uses the
reserve funds for anything but the intended purpose – or
somebody is even embezzling the money.
I agree:
All these necessary changes to the law will only work if these
newly created laws are strictly enforced. And that is the
NUMBER 1 priority for the next legislative session.
Florida’s condo owners pay annually millions of dollars into the
Condo Trust fund to finance a regulatory agency called the “Division
of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes” –
and this Division is about as useless as a pimple.
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Jan Bergemann is president of Cyber Citizens For Justice,
Florida
's largest state-wide property owners' advocacy group.
CCFJ works on legislation to help owners living in
community
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associations. He moved to
Florida
in 1995 - hoping to retire. He moved into a HOA, where the
developer cheated the homeowners and used the association dues
for his own purposes. End of retirement!
CCFJ was born in the year 2000, when some owners met in
Tallahassee
- finding out that power is only in numbers. Bergemann was a
member of Governor Jeb Bush's HOA Task force in 2003/2004.
The organization has two websites to inform interested
Florida
homeowners and condo owners:
News Website: http://www.ccfj.net/.
Educational Website: http://www.ccfjfoundation.net/.
We think that only owners can really represent owners, since all
service providers surely have a different interest! We are
trying to create owner-friendly laws, but the best laws are
useless without enforcement. And enforcement is totally lacking
in
Florida
!
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