Skip one payment and you won't lose your car.

Forget your $100 monthly condominium association payment and you could lose your home.

It could happen to any of the 1.1 million condo owners in Florida because a 1990 change to the condo law designed to help associations get the money they need to operate created a new legal specialty: condo bill collecting.

Don't pay the $100 and after 15 days, your association's attorney bills you for $350 -- the $100 plus $250 for the cost of writing a letter and filing a lien. Call to complain, and you're charged an additional $100 for the attorney's time.

The following month, you send in $100 for the last month and $100 for the current month. The law lets the attorney get paid first. So the result is you still owe your association and the attorney money, and they have the right to foreclose.

State Rep. Julio Robaina, R-Miami, is attempting to change that.

Robaina introduced a bill (HB1223/SB2498) into the current session of the Legislature that would ensure associations get their money first.

It would prohibit late fees or interest from being the sole reason for a lien, require 30 days notice to an owner before a lien can be filed, and restrict attorneys to charging not more than $75 a page for writing a form letter demanding payment.

"The lawyers have been making a living for too long off the backs of people who have to give them their hard-earned dollars," said Robaina, chairman of the House Select Committee on Condominium Association Governance.

The proposed bill passed though its first legislative committee and today will be debated before the House State Administration Committee.

"This will help hundreds of thousands of people who don't even know they're in harm's way yet," said F. Blane Carneal, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who represents unit owners against associations.

The state's condo lawyers are fighting the bill. They are sending out fliers urging owners to oppose the measure.

"We are lobbying so hard to defeat HB 1223 because it is ill-conceived, poorly worded and would significantly undermine the board's ability to run the condominium," said Gary Poliakoff, who heads the Fort Lauderdale-based law offices of Becker & Poliakoff.

Poliakoff said nearly all attorneys take collection cases on an "at risk basis" and rely on their professional ability to collect from delinquent owners. If they didn't have the ability to lien and foreclose for the costs, fees and interest, "then the net effect is that the association and unit owners lose, since [owners who pay] will end up eating the tab for the deadbeats."

Condo directors concede they are confused.

Leon Lehrer, director of a 200-unit association at Hillcrest in Hollywood, called a "protest rally" for Monday after being told that under the bill, "the state would take over our condos."

"At first, when we put up the notices, we were outraged," he said on Friday.

"But now we're getting other information that makes us wonder."

Robaina said he learned about the fliers when his office started getting calls of opposition after months of support.

"We were curious, so we called these people back and asked them why they opposed it," Robaina said.

"They said they didn't know, that they hadn't seen the bill, that they were told to oppose it [by their association's law firm]. We asked what they were told and they said it was that their maintenance would be raised $200 or $300. I must have heard that 200 or 300 times in the past week.''

The only costs of the bill, he said, would be a few dollars a year.

That would fund some of the other provisions of the bill, including creation of an ombudsman to resolve conflicts between boards and owners and education of new board members.

Sam Lewis, who owns a condo unit in Habitat II in Lauderhill, called the current system of paying lawyers first a form of "organized crime, white collar crime, ripping people off right and left."

Lewis is fighting an $81,000 debt that a Lauderhill law firm claims is owed because he missed a $264 payment.

"What they [the lawyers who collect condo bills] do is filthy," he said.

Carneal said that more associations should try harder to collect debts on their own.

"Why throw it to a lawyer when a phone call from the president would and should solve the problem," he said. "Why not build rapport with your neighbors instead of making enemies?"