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MOST SCARY FOR COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION OWNERS?
By
Jan Bergemann
Published
October 31, 2014
Make no mistake: Owners living in
community associations should be really scared of our government
and our legislators. They are the ones who treat you like
their personal cash cow!
No matter what people are trying to
tell you, this community association system was invented to
create more taxable income for our government entities.
Community associations are nothing more than a system to
double-tax homeowners.
Remember the good old times when each
homeowner owned his private property and everything around it
was owned by the state and had to be maintained by the
government entity in charge be it city or county. in
exchange for your property taxes?
Remember the good old times when you
found a pothole on the street in front of your drive-way and
all you had to do was call city/county and some repair crew came
around and fixed the pothole without any cost to you?
Now you have to call the community
association manager and if you are lucky the pothole will be
fixed one day. But, if you look at the financial statement of
your association, you will find that you and your neighbors had
to pay for the repair despite paying property taxes.
This is just one example of many where
you are forced to pay double without getting a better product.
These community associations were
obviously created to make everybody rich at the expense of the
homeowners. Not only are you being double-taxed, you are as well
forced to pay outrageous cost to attorneys, developers,
community association managers and other vendors who only exist
because of the creation of these community associations. They
all would have to look for another source of income if there
would be no community associations.
In order to make it easier for everybody involved to fleece the
owners who fell into this community association trap our
legislators made sure that the legislation regulating these
association was very vague and had no teeth meaning
enforcement of the laws claiming to protect the owners in these
associations is very difficult or even impossible!
With other words: Everybody profits
from these community associations with exception of the owners
who are forced to pay what everybody else decides!
And all that under the absolutely
false headline: PROTECTING YOUR PROPERTY VALUES!
This statement is about as false as
all the little witches and goblins showing up at your door on
Halloween.
With other words: You get legally
fleeced by our government by paying property taxes without
receiving the services that should normally be delivered by your
government entity in exchange for paying your property taxes. On
top of the regular taxes you are paying ever-increasing monthly
maintenance fees (only a small portion of these
fees are really used for maintenance) to your community
association in order to pay for services you have already paid
for when paying property taxes.
Isnt that really scary? There is no Trick
or Treat like on Halloween there is only
the conclusion that you are being tricked into paying double and
often being treated like a little child that needs to be
punished for misbehavior by some folks who believe that their
ancestors must have been named Adolf, Joseph or Fidel!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN?
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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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