I know everyone is busy preparing for the holidays but I wanted to post our January seminar schedule:

All of these seminars will start at 10 a.m. and will end between noon and 12:30 p.m. 

We’ll be discussing requirements and procedures for properly and efficiently conducting meetings, issues involving swimming pools, and any proposed legislation making its way to Tallahassee for the 2011 lawmaking session that may impact resident owned communities in our state.

We’ll conclude with our traditional "open forum" for questions and suggestions for future seminar topics.

As always, admission is free, refreshments will be served, and you’ll have a great opportunity to mix and mingle with members of other ROCs in your area.

Please email Karen Midlam (kmidlam@lutzbobo.com), Kathy Sawdo (ksawdo@lutzbobo.com) or me (sgordon@lutzbobo.com) if you’d like to attend one of these events.  Just let us know which seminar and the number of residents from your community that will be attending.

I’ll also be speaking at the Mid-Florida ROC meeting at Hawthorne  in Leesburg on the morning of Tuesday, January 25.

Our best wishes to you and yours for a very happy and healthy holiday season.   We’re looking forward to seeing you in January!

We just finished a busy two week stretch of very well attended seminars.   Thanks to our friends at Paradise Bay Estates in Bradenton, Imperial Bonita Estates in Bonita Springs, Village at Riverwalk in North Port, and Hammock Estates in Sebring for hosting those events.

One of the topics we discussed involved how to balance the rights of a member of a resident owned community to inspect and copy the association’s "official records" with the rights of each resident of the community to have certain information remain confidential and protected.

I wanted to highlight several important points made during my presentation on this topic:

  • Almost any document currently located in the association’s offices falls within the definition of an "official record" under the Florida Statutes governing condominium, cooperative, and mandatory homeowners’ associations.
  • However, certain documents that are "official’ records are nonetheless protected or :"exempt" and even if a member requests to inspect those documents the association shall not allow that member access to those records. 
  • Florida’s legislators recently amended the statutes governing condominium and mandatory homeowners’ associations and added several new categories of these protected or "exempt" documents.   However, the legislators failed to amend the statute governing cooperative associations and, as a result, a member of a cooperative association may still be entitled to inspect personnel records as well as obtain information about other residents–such as email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, and northern addresses–that are now clearly "off limits" to members of condominium associations or mandatory homeowners associations.
  • All managers and board members should remember that a member cannot simply show up in the office one day and demand that he immediately be allowed to inspect one or more of the association’s "official records".  There is a specific procedure that is to be followed under Florida’s statutes and all members should be required to follow those procedures.

We always suggest that any request to inspect an association’s "official records" be immediately forwarded to the association’s attorney.  The attorney can help the association properly evaluate and respond to request and assist in ensuring that the association complies with Florida’s statutory requirements while not violating its members’ privacy rights.

The dates, locations and topics for our January seminars will be announced within the next week.  Stay tuned and try to keep warm!

Now that the annual migration of the "snowbirds" to our resident owned communities is well under way, so are the number of complaints we receive each week about  "nuisances".   Whether it’s the dog that barks at all hours of the day and night, the next door neighbor who plays his stereo loudly, or the "shady" character across the street who insists on hosting "wild" parties with the "wrong" crowd every night, I can assure you that every ROC has at one time or another dealt with behavior that at least some of its residents believe is a "nuisance."

There have been some recent decisions from the arbitrators at the Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s Division of Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes on the subject.

Here’s a summary of some of those decisions:

  • A Summary Final Order by an arbitrator in November of 2008 provides that proof of a "nuisance" requires evidence of repeated behavior which interferes with a protected legal right in a substantial, appreciable, and tangible way.  Nuisance is not established by evidence limited to two isolated incidents of subjective reactions to the operation of a Segway on the community’s common elements.
  • Last December, an arbitrator found that a single incident of yelling at board members did not, as a matter of law, constitute a "nuisance".
  • No "nuisance" was found in a January, 2009 decision that involved an allegation of a single instance of a drunken brawl in the ROC’s jacuzzi involving tenants of the unit owner. 
  • In August of 2009, an arbitrator determined an arbitration petition that only alleged a single incidence of yelling and drunkenness was not sufficient to establish a "nuisance."
  • However, an arbitrator’s order entered in September of 2009 found that where a unit owner was alleged to have removed extensive portions of the common element drywall in his condominium unit, which made it much easier for cigarette smoke to pass from his unit into adjoining units, that unit owner was ordered to restore all of the drywall in his unit and to cease smoking in the unit until the required drywall was restored.
  • Finally, an arbitrator’s decision in January of 2009 required a unit owner to remove pit bulls exceeding 20 pounds from her unit.  The ROC’s declaration of condominium permitted pets weighing less than 20 pounds and prohibited nuisances or practices that were a source of annoyance to the residents or interfered with other unit owners’ peaceful possession of their units.  One of the pit bulls had already bitten a resident and the unit owner had demonstrated that she would continue to flout the requirements of the declaration without an order from the arbitrator requiring compliance.

Thanks to my colleague, Karl Scheuerman, for compiling a very comprehensive summary of the DBPR’S arbitration decisions.

Paradise Bay and Imperial Bonita Estates did a fine job of hosting last week’s seminars and we’re looking forward to this week’s seminars at Village at Riverwalk in North Port and Hammock Estates in Sebring. 

We’ve set the date and location of the seminar for the board members and managers of resident owned communities in the Lee, Collier, and Charlotte county area:

This event will start at 10 a.m. and end around noon.  Just like the other seminars posted in my last blog entry, admission is free and so are the refreshments and opportunities to mix and mingle with fellow ROC members.  

We’ll be covering several very interesting topics at our December seminars:

  • Updates on dealing with pet and caregiver requests under the Fair Housing and Americans With Disabilities Acts
  • Privacy issues facing managers and board members in resident owned communities
  • Recent legislative changes to Florida’s statutes governing ROCs
  • As always, attendees will have time for questions and comments.

Please send an email to Karen Midlam (kmidlam@lutzbobo.com), Kathy Sawdo (ksawdo@lutzbobo.com) or to me (sgordon@lutzbobo.com) if you’d like to attend any of our December seminars.   Let us know which event you’ll be attending, the number of attendees from your community, and whether you’ll need directions to the seminar.

We hope to see you in December at one of these seminars.

There’s a ROC group that ‘s been formed in East Pasco County (EPROC) and I wanted to post the dates of their upcoming meetings:

  • November 19th
  • December 10th
  • January 14th
  • February 11th
  • March 11th
  • April 8th

If you’re a member of a resident-owned community in that area and want more information, please send me an email and I’ll point you in the right direction.  The EPROC meetings begin at 9 a.m. and the November meeting is at Betmar Acres.

EPROC is off to a great start and I look forward to speaking at that November 19th meeting.

We’ve scheduled three of the four seminars we’ll be presenting in December for managers and board members in resident-owned communities. 

Here are the dates and locations:

I’ll be posting the location of the seminar for our Lee and Collier communities and a brief description of the topics we’ll be covering within the next few days.

These events will start at 10 a.m. and run until about noon.    Admission is free and so are the refreshments.  Our seminars are a great opportunity  to meet and discuss common issues with members of other ROCs in the area.

If you’d like to attend, please email me at sgordon@lutzbobo.com, Karen Midlam at kmidlam@lutzbobo.com, or Kathy Sawdo at ksawdo@lutzbobo.com.   Let us know which event you’ll be attending, the number of members of your ROC that will be attending with you, and whether you need directions to the host community. 

We’ll look forward to seeing you in December!

The Florida Resident Owned Communities website has a very helpful calendar that lists the upcoming meetings of the ROC groups serving Lake, Sumter and Orange Counties (Mid-Florida ROC), Southwest Florida (SWFROC), and Pinellas County (ROC Forum).   I hope you’ll find that calendar useful and will bookmark it for future reference.

Enjoy this great weather and we’ll see you next month!

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Fort Lauderdale attending the Thirty-Fifth Institute on Condominium and Cluster Developments presented by the University of Miami School of Law.  I’ll be posting future blog entries about several of the topics covered at the Institute but wanted to draw your attention to two items that I think you’ll find interesting:

  • Last week, I received an email from the Community Associations Institute that introduced me to a new term– "HOA Syndrome" and a web site advertising a seminar in a suburb of  Las Vegas (no surprise there!) on how residents can recover monetary damages for the injuries inflicted upon them by community association boards.  You’ll also find on that website a link to a paper by a Professor Gary Solomon that refers to this "HOA Syndrome" as "A Two-Tailed Psychiatric Disorder".  Let’s just say that I was less than impressed with that paper but I’ll look forward to your comments after you’ve taken a look at what Professor Solomon has to say and the HOA Syndrome site.
  • One of my colleagues, Ira Leesfield,wrote an article that appeared in the October 18th edition of the Miami Herald.   There are some very important issues raised in this article and I highly recommend that every ROC manager and board member strongly consider Mr. Leesfield’s suggestion that community associations adopt and implement written policies that prohibit employees using cell phones or other mobile devices for work-related purposes while driving.

The first annual Dowd Whittaker Community Association Festival was lots of fun and a great success and I look forward to speaking at that event next year.  It was very nice to see all of the familiar faces and I hope the board members and managers of the ROCs we work with enjoyed the Festival as much as I did.   Thanks to everyone who attended and participated!

We’re finalizing the dates and locations of our first set of this season’s seminars and I hope to have that information on the blog by the week’s end. 

 

 

I just wanted to post a quick link to the DBPR’s website with the times and locations of the DBPR seminars in Sarasota on the evening of October 18 and in Clearwater on the evening of October 19.

You’ll note that the seminar in Sarasota can be accessed online.

Also, don’t forget the Community Association Festival in Venice on the mornings of October 19 and October 20.

We’ll be posting the dates, times and locations of our first set of this season’s ROC seminars within the next two weeks.

Enjoy this great weather–looks like autumn has arrived in Florida!

Here’s a wild situation that apparently occurred in a ROC in Florida as reported by one of my community association law colleagues:

Every director on the board of condominium association resigned rather than respond to a unit owner’s request to inspect the association’s official records.   I’m sure we’re all wondering what these directors were trying to hide but the question that was raised was what could be done to keep the association itself from collapsing in the absence of board members and officers?

There is a provision in the Florida Statutes that can be used to help a condominium association in this situation.  F.S. Section 718.1124 provides that, if an association fails to fill vacancies on the board sufficient to constitute a quorum in accordance with its bylaws, any unit owner may give notice of his or her intent to apply to the local circuit court for the appointment of a receiver to manage the affairs of the association.   The form of the notice is set forth in F.S. Section 718.1124(1) and the manner of notifying the membership is set forth in F.S. Section 718.1124(2).

Once the notice is properly posted and mailed or delivered, the association has 30 days to fill the vacancies.  If this is not done, the unit owner may proceed with the petition.

If the unit owner’s petition is granted, a receiver will be appointed and will have all powers and duties of "a duly constituted board of administration".   The receive will serve in that capacity until the association fills enough board vacancies to constitute a quorum and the court relieves the receiver of the appointment.

Of course, the association will be responsible to pay the receiver’s salary and the court costs and attorney’s fees involved in the petition to appoint the receiver.

Provisions for the appointment of a receiver in similar situations in cooperative associations and mandatory homeowners’ associations can be found in F.S.Sections 719.1124 and 720.3053 respectively.

Sounds like a costly situation and one that should be avoided if at all possible.   Since the governing documents of many associations provide that board vacancies can be filled by the members that remain on the board, even if those remaining members constitute less than a quorum, perhaps the best thing to do when the entire board wants to " jump ship" is for the members to convince one of those board members to remain on the board at least until that remaining member can appoint enough new board members so that a quorum of board members is in place.

Better yet, let’s all hope that our communities can avoid this nightmare.

I’ll look forward to seeing some of you at next week’s Community Association Festival on October 19 or 20 at the Venice Community Center! 

 

 

 

It’s always a pleasure to welcome a new member into the family of resident owned communities.

On September 15, the resident purchase and conversion of the communities of Country Lakes I and II in Manatee County was completed. 

The proud owner of this 471 site community is Country Lakes Co-op, Inc.  Kudos to the residents that participated in the purchase effort and especially to Marty Pozgay and his Florida Community Services Group for helping the residents realize their dreams of ownership.

The HOA officers received the 45 day notice from the owner of Country Lakes I and II on June 28, 2010.  At that time, about seventy per cent of the homeowners had left those communities for their summer residences and Marty and the remaining thirty per cent were faced with the daunting task of raising six million dollars for an earnest money deposit (to be applied to the total purchase price of 32.2 million dollars) in a very short period of time.  

The blanket loan was provided byBank of America and individual share loans were provided by Patriot Bank andWhitney Bank.

Congratulations to the residents at Country Lakes and to everyone that helped Country Lake Co-op, Inc. become the newest ROC in Florida!

Those of you in the Sarasota, Manatee, and De Soto County area, please don’t forget to rsyp for the upcoming Dowd Whittaker Community Association Festival on either October 19 or October 20.   John Dowd promises a morning of education and fun for all and I’ll be one of the speakers–plus you’ll get to see me in one of my flashiest Hawaiian shirts.

See you there!

Sometimes even I’m surprised by what can occur in a resident-owned community.

I recently received an email from one of the followers of my blog.  I’ve copied and pasted most of it below for your review and comment:

  • A resident-owned community quietly begins installing surveillance cameras in buildings and on common grounds. Some of the more "private" rooms also had cameras installed… the quiet little library and the small exercise room. No official notice was given to the residents that the cameras have been installed, or worse yet, that the cameras are now functioning. No signs have been installed stating that surveillance is happening.
  • At the last board meeting, residents learned that a computer monitor in the association office is taping all of the camera locations into a two year (?) memory system. At the same meeting, the residents were aghast to hear from the association president that he has been watching the residents, from all eight camera locations, on his own computer in ______________(note that I’ve intentionally deleted the President’s home location here to protect the "innocent").  No one in the park had been officially notified that the cameras had been installed or were functioning before this time.

I’d love to hear what you think about this invasion of privacy and in particular your thoughts on exactly what laws (if any) have been broken.  In addition, do any of you believe that the members of the board as well as the association’s President should have to answer to the membership?  It does not appear that the installation of these surveillance cameras was approved by the board at a properly noticed meeting open to all association members.  I’ll look forward to the comments from my readers on this distressing situation.

Speaking of distressing situations, a recent column  by Eric Ernst in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune describes the plight of mobile home owners in an investor-owned community in Venice.   While the value of their homes may be decreasing, the value of the community in which these residents live (as mobile home owners on rented lots) appears to be increasing, at least in the eyes of the county’s Property Appraiser.   Needless to say, many home owners in that community are not exactly thrilled with the Property Appraiser’s evaluation.

I’ll be posting news about another educational event for ROC board members in the next week or so as well as times, dates, and locations for our first set of the upcoming season’s resident owned community seminars.   In the meantime, enjoy these first few weeks of college football!