HOA/CONDO TOWN HALL MEETING DORAL 2024

An Opinion By Jan Bergemann
President, Cyber Citizens For Justice, Inc.

Published April 20, 2024

For all the interested folks who couldn't be at the DORAL TOWN HALL MEETING on April 13, 2024 -- here is a summary I was able to put together. But due to the fact that the audio often failed, I had to edit the video in order to make it presentable. I tried my best!

First of all our great THANKS go to Doral Mayor Christi Fraga, who organized this very informational HOA/CONDO session. Well planned -- with lots of very knowledgeable panel members.

These kind of Town Hall Meetings are very important in order to keep owners and board members up-to-date with all the new laws enacted by the Florida Legislature. Our Legislators made this year really a lot of efforts to create owner-friendly bills -- bills that will hopefully soon signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis.

More than 200 interested owners signed up on the sign-in sheets and it was in the end standing room only. Maybe the organizers didn't anticipate such huge interest from the owners?

I opened the session as the first speaker, but I'm sorry to say that nearly all of the audio of my speech disappeared due to non-functioning microphones. I order to give you an idea what I was talking about, below are the bullet points I used for my speech:

BULLET POINTS FOR SPEECH

· Thank you to Mayor Christi Fraga, State Representatives JC Porras, Vicki Lopez, Jennifer Esposito and Senator Jennifer Bradley and an especially big Thank-You to State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle for pushing these great bills!

· Mandatory Education of Board Members + CAMs: Seminars can’t be done by Zoom or YouTube – otherwise the education provisions in the bills are useless. Division has the right to approve these seminars.

· This year’s bills are very owner-friendly and will hopefully take care of preventing many of the fraudulent (not only embezzlement) actions pretty common in Florida’s community associations. But the state attorneys have to act fast and not allow statute of limitations to run out.

BOCA VIEW CONDOMINIUM – The Condo from Hell. Association president Diana Kuka sues every owner trying to sell his/her unit by falsely claiming that the association has the right to approve buyers (this is not the case) and sues every owner asking to inspect financial records – even going to Federal Court.

One owner who dared to ask for these records now owes about $ 395,000 in legal fees after a judge found in favor of the association despite not allowing record inspection.

UNBELIEVABLE! A myriad of other lawsuits were lost by the association and according to my estimate the association must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, a lot of money for an association with only 72 units. But maybe board president Diana Kuka gets a big discount from the attorneys since she is the Secretary of the local chapter of the Community Association Institute.

Owners with properties in HOAs regulated by FS 720 got a lot of help from this year’s bills, but they still don’t have a REGULATORY AGENCY. Any little complaint has to be litigated in court, something many owners just can’t afford considering today’s attorneys’ fees. The Legislature should consider adding HOAs to the Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes. With more than 2.5 million homes in HOAs, the annual dues for everybody could be reduced to $2 per unit/home – and there would be still more than enough money to create a Cadillac of a regulatory agency.

THANK YOU TO LISTENING TO OUR CONCERNS!

The highlight of the session was the Q&A panel discussion moderated by Mayor Christi Fraga. It was a very interesting panel: State Representative JC Porras, John Perikles from the Miami SA Economic Crime Unit (he lead the investigation of the Hammocks case), Tamara Reyes from SoFlo Property Owners Consulting, Carlos Luffi from the Miami-Dade Police Department Economic Crime Unit and Dana Goldman, a local Real Estate attorney.

I saved as much as possible and hope you get the idea what was being discussed. You can watch the videos by clicking on the hot links.