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WILL THESE BILLS REALLY HELP?
By
Jan Bergemann
Published June 3, 2022
During the special session the Florida
Legislature passed two bills that were quickly signed into law
by Governor Ron DeSantis:
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SB 2D – Property Insurance
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SB 4D – Building Safety
Both bills were quickly pushed through
House and Senate – without really long debates.
The big question still remains: Will
these bills really help? I guess TIME WILL TELL!
A lot of provisions were packed into
these two bills – provisions that already got mixed reviews. It
will be especially interesting to read the different
interpretations of these bills since the language is not always
very clear and/or easy to understand.
The Building Safety Bill
– the response of the Legislature to the collapse of the
Champlain Towers South – contains a lot of good safety measures,
but the fact that the legislature ignored in the past to create
these kinds of measures – especially mandatory funding of
structural reserves – will now come back to haunt the
associations that year-for-year voted no to fund the reserves.
Despite warnings by a lot of experts the non-funding of reserves
was allowed by the legislature since more than 20 years.
Now the owners failing to fund
reserves for many years will have to pay up in big chunks. Not
only will the monthly maintenance fees go up quickly, serious
special assessments will be on the horizon in order to pay for
all the necessary structural repairs if the owners want to avoid
that their building will be red-tagged and they have to leave
their homes on short notice.
On the other hand I predict a lot of
foreclosures because many owners, especially the elderly living
on social security, will not have the money to pay for the
seriously increasing maintenance fees and the special
assessments.
Owners, who didn’t opt for fully
funded reserves often relied on the fact that in the past the
cost for these very expensive repairs was covered by bank loans.
That option is pretty much off the table since bank loans are
nowadays very difficult to come by and will only be granted if
the association can jump through a lot of new hoops created by
banks after the Surfside disaster.
We can already agree on one thing: CONDO-LIVING IN FLORIDA
WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!
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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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