COURTESY : Ocala Star Banner - the Reporter
Published November 7, 2003
BY BILL KOCH

TALLAHASSEE - The Florida Silver-Haired Legislature wants state lawmakers to revamp a state statute allowing community development districts.

Tom Poss, FSHL's new Speaker of the House and former area chairman, said he hopes state legislators will revise State Statute 190 to give residents in the districts say in how developers spend and collect fees.

The FSHL, a 300-member nonprofit organization that devises legislative recommendations, met late last month in Tallahassee for its annual session.

Poss said the statute wrongly gives developers control over how homeowners' money in deed-restricted communities is spent.

"It's a factor of making them responsible to the people living in the (community development districts)," he said. "They (developers) have complete control of what they buy."

Poss and his wife, Charlotte, who is FSHL's state membership chairwoman, moved out of The Villages in July, citing what they called overly restrictive regulations on the use of their property. They had moved to The Villages from Wisconsin in 1997.

"We got a bigger piece of land. We don't have to live under anybody's rules," Charlotte Poss said. "We're not living under a dictatorship."

Tom Poss said most people who move to Florida to retire do not understand the state's regulations of deed restricted communities.

"We do not want to abolish the statute," he said. "We just want the people to have a voice in their destiny."

Initially the legal concept of community development districts launched the Sunshine State's boon in retirement communities. Walt Disney purchased land in the Orlando area 40 years ago and utilized community development districts for surrounding communities.

"The lawyers are now finding the loopholes in the statutes," Poss said. He said he would like to see rules written into the statute that require developers to disclose to potential home buyers how money will be spent and for what.

"I want the people to be told. They're not being told now," he said.

Charlotte Poss said her biggest complaint as a resident of The Villages was the developer's use of bond money to put in liners in lakes. She said home buyers, who sometimes pay $40,000 premiums for "lakefront" properties, should bear the expense of the liners when sudden sinkholes drain lakes or retention areas. Dozens of sinkholes have opened in the community in the last year.

Bond money, she said, is used instead to buy the liners, which come from amenity fees.

"Everyone has to pay for them," she said.