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MASTER ASSOCIATION – TWO DICTATORSHIPS?
By
Jan Bergemann
Published January 22, 2021
Often it’s bad enough if you live
under the dictatorial rule of a mandatory community association.
But it gets even worse if your association is part of a master
association. Then you may have two dictators running your life
and your personal finances.
That creates two sets of rules that
sometimes even contradict each other. And owners have to
understand that the rule of a master association is not
automatically the rule of the subdivision – and vice versa.
Nobody should ever forget the costly
lawsuit that haunted the
Eagles Homeowners Association for years and ended with
legal fees of more than $500,000 and a victory for the
homeowner. See:
Judge: Homeowners association must pay pickup owner's legal fees.
This is by far not the only example
when associations and owners couldn’t agree what set of rules
was valid for a certain situation. The only winners in these
disputes: The attorneys!
It’s bad enough if you happen to live
in one of these associations, but it gets even worse if there
are two dictatorships and they fight over the issue whose rules
are valid and what rules supersede the rules of the other
association.
THE ONLY LOSERS: THE OWNERS,
whose finances are paying for the whole nonsense.
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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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