Storm damage festers

Squabbles, hurricanes pile on N. Fort Myers condo's mess

Article Courtesy of The News-Press

By Jennifer Booth Reed

Published July 13, 2006

Two years after Hurricane Charley barreled through Southwest Florida, Gwen Spiher, Mary Manning and six of their neighbors are still without a home.

They've found places to stay, but home — the North Fort Myers condominium to which they retired years ago — sits vacant and storm battered, and awaiting an almost $500,000 repair job.

When she checks on her unit, Manning, 68, can stand in what used to be her bedroom and look into blue skies. Spiher, 70, can track the green, gray and brown patches creeping up her once-white walls.

Charley had barreled in from the north side of the building, pushed the rear wall until it tilted and ripped holes in the roof. Then, last October, Hurricane Wilma rushed in from the south, blasting the building's front and taking away the temporary roof.

The combination of the two storms and a series of mishaps has delayed the repair of Greenwood Condominium Building 4, an eight-unit condo that's home to one working attorney, seven retired ladies and one aging husband. Everyone has scattered to temporary living arrangements, where they wait for the mess to be straightened out and watch their insurance-provided expense accounts dwindle away.

Internal disputes, insurance headaches and permitting problems have thwarted the restoration. Building 4 is not like other condominium complexes. There's no professional management company. There's not a neighborhood's worth of people to look to for advice. There's just a three-person board picked out of the group of nine homeowners.

"The whole place is deteriorating daily," Manning said, unlocking the front door of her second-floor unit.

Hurricanes and feuds

Her floors are covered with piles of pink insulation.

Spiher lives directly below. She was able to stay in her apartment until April because the water seeping in Manning's ceilings had taken some time to work its way downstairs. Spiher tried sleeping on her enclosed back porch until she gave up and moved in with a friend.

"None of this would have been so bad if (damage from) Charley had been fixed," Spiher said.

The building is covered by St. Paul Travelers Insurance. The company put up a temporary roof and agreed to pay for interior demolition. The homeowners paid their $29,000 deductible and watched the temporary roof go up and Fire Service, a restoration firm, gut their units.

Then came the dispute over the contractor.

Manning and Spiher wanted a local firm, but Travelers didn't approve the one they chose. The contractor had not submitted his plans on a square-footage basis, the format Travelers requires. The company sent in an out-of-town firm, InStar Services Group, which is based in Texas but has offices elsewhere in Florida.

Manning and Spiher were suspicious of an insurance company bringing in its own contractor. And they were furious with the other homeowners for giving InStar their vote.

A hint at how relations were going: Spiher told a news reporter to pretend she was a personal friend during a visit to the condo — she didn't want her neighbors to know she'd alerted the media.

"Oh, they're going to yap at me," Spiher said.

Margie Holmquist, 78, the association president, dismissed the notion internal feuding had delayed repairs.

"We're all getting along fine," she insisted.

But she was critical of the women wanting to stay with the local firm.

"We finally said, 'Listen, we've got to get another contractor,'" Holmquist said.

A majority of residents approved the contract with InStar in April.

Problems continued

There was no conspiracy, said Dilman Thomas, in response to Manning and Spiher's complaint. Thomas is executive vice president and general manager of Oswald, Trippe & Co., the condo's local insurance agent.

The association could have persuaded its initial contractor to re-submit his bid in square-footage — a model Thomas said is standard in the industry — or it could have found someone else that could match InStar's estimate, he said.

The insurer, Thomas said, is going to look for a contractor that can make the repairs the adjustor deems necessary at a price the adjustor believes is reasonable.

"This is what it takes. Can you do it for that amount of money?" Thomas said.

The headaches kept coming.

Building 4 was built in 1972. When the condo emerged from the hurricanes, more than 50 percent of it was destroyed. That triggered laws requiring the repair job to bring the building up to current building codes and ordinances.

But the insurance policy doesn't cover such differences in codes. The residents of Building 4 likely will have to pay out-of-pocket for upgrades the policy doesn't include. How much they'll end up paying is unclear.

"It's not uncommon," Thomas said of the code coverage in Building 4's policy. "If they didn't have as much damage as they did, they probably wouldn't be dealing with these codes and ordinances."

That leads to the latest snare — a question of whether Building 4 needed a sprinkler system.

Representatives from the county's planning department initially told residents they wouldn't. But last October, new state building codes went into effect. No one had pulled permits for Building 4, so it appeared the condo was going to need sprinklers after all.

The residents were furious.

"We're tired of it. Just totally tired," said Mike Taylor, whose mother-in-law, Pauline Champion, lived in Building 4. "It's been disgusting. ... I've gone to all the meetings — the sprinkler system was just the last thing."

But, finally, last week brought a lucky break.

County permitting officials scrutinized legal interpretations of the codes and decided Building 4 could be restored without sprinklers.

It looks like the restoration may finally get under way — just as Hurricane Charley's two-year anniversary approaches.

"They picked up their permits today," Sharon Reynolds of the commercial planning review department said a week ago Friday.

But after the nightmare of the past two years, Gwen Spiher said she may just sell her place.

"I will never live in a condo again," Spiher said.

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