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.

 

Isn’t 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 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  

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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