Soon after Jason Pizzo was elected to Florida’s state Senate in 2018, he began working on a bill that reflected one of his top priorities: stiffening penalties for secrecy, fraud and kickbacks on condominium boards.
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“I have huge law firms
and lobbying firms pushing back,” Pizzo said. The result, he
said, shows that “any reasonable efforts to protect our
constituents and their residences is often overwhelmed by
the influence of lobbyists with a captive audience in
Tallahassee.”
The experience has been a lesson for Pizzo in making condo
laws in the Florida Legislature, where veteran lobbyists
hold outsize sway over part-time lawmakers constrained by
term limits and a 60-day window each year to decide which
among hundreds of bills should become law.
Florida, where millions of homes are vulnerable to
hurricanes, rising seas and saltwater corrosion, has some of
the country’s strictest regulations for high-rise condos.
But the June 24 collapse of Champlain Towers South, a
12-story condo tower in Surfside, has drawn fresh attention
to loopholes that allow condo associations to delay
inspections, renovations and compliance with directives they
say are too expensive or burdensome.
The collapse, which killed 98 people, remains under
investigation. Several former Champlain Towers South
residents have filed lawsuits accusing the association’s
board of directors of negligence for failing to address
structural damage pointed out in a 2018 engineering report.
Authorities have not filed any criminal charges, although
prosecutors have asked a grand jury to investigate the
collapse. A spokesman for the condo association previously
said its members were trying their best to keep residents
safe. The condo association’s court-appointed lawyer did not
respond to a request for comment.
To examine how condo associations squash efforts to hold
them accountable for buildings’ financial and physical
health, NBC News reviewed condo regulations considered by
the Florida Legislature over the past decade. The analysis,
based on interviews with more than a dozen lobbyists,
lawyers and current and former lawmakers, along with an
examination of legislative records, public hearings and
campaign finance data, shows how lobbyists and trade groups
work with condo associations to influence lawmakers,
offering a glimpse into a niche corner of Florida politics
that typically avoids public scrutiny.
Over the last decade, groups lobbying on behalf of condo
associations and the lawyers, property managers and other
professionals who work for them have been paid nearly $2
million to influence lawmakers of both parties, according to
campaign finance records. Millions more in campaign
contributions have been spent by political action committees
whose interests include condo association laws; they
represent real estate lawyers, real estate agents and home
builders.
Condo associations are volunteer, elected groups of
residents who largely get organized to fight regulations
that would subject them to greater scrutiny or require them
to impose higher fees on their fellow unit owners.
“They are a very vocal constituency on issues that a lot of
people in Florida don’t really care about,” said George
Moraitis Jr., a Fort Lauderdale real estate lawyer and a
Republican who served from 2010 to 2018 in the state House
of Representatives, where he sponsored several bills favored
by condo associations.
“They’re very organized. Where they are concentrated, they
are very powerful. They’re very vocal and active. A lot of
them vote.”
Because legislators must keep their day jobs and are
prohibited from serving more than eight years in office,
much of the policymaking expertise in Tallahassee lies with
lobbyists, who interview candidates for office to get their
opinions on condo issues, pitch proposed legislation to
interested lawmakers and then work to shepherd those bills
through the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Lobbyists and condo associations organize door-to-door
mobilizations and letter-writing campaigns, help bill
sponsors respond to questions, try to win over legislative
leaders and plan how to defend bills at committee hearings.
The 60-day sprint each spring in Tallahassee results in long
bills that become vehicles for an array of tangentially
related provisions favored by party leaders or industry
advocates. In one case NBC News reviewed, several lawmakers
said they didn’t know what had been put into bills they
sponsored — and one didn’t realize he was voting to repeal a
law he had sponsored two years earlier.
“What they typically want they are generally going to get,
politically,” Moraitis said of condo associations. “Absent a
lot of political will to overcome that, it’s left to condos
to drive how they’re governed.”
Such a reckoning may now be at hand, as lawmakers promise
changes in the wake of the Champlain Towers South collapse.
That showdown won’t happen until the state Legislature meets
again early next year, but elected leaders, condo
associations and lobbyists are already gearing up for the
battle, with preliminary meetings among lawmakers expected
to begin next month.
Florida law creates a dangerous conflict for condo
associations by allowing them to act in a building’s
short-term financial interest at the expense of long-term
safety, said Eric Glazer, a condo association lawyer who
writes a blog and hosts a radio show on the topic.
“The Champlain Towers accident happened because Florida law
allowed it to happen on so many levels,” he said.
Any new regulations will have to take into consideration how
difficult it is for condo boards to set aside money for
long-term repairs while also avoiding spending that could
make it harder for residents to pay their bills or to sell
their units, said William Sklar, a lawyer who represents
developers and teaches condo law at the University of Miami.
He leads a task force at the Florida Bar that will recommend
changes before the 2022 legislative session to how condos
are regulated, including how frequently they are inspected
and how much money they should keep in reserves.
“Florida boards are made up of well-intended volunteers who
care about their neighbors and property values but are under
intense pressure not to waste money,” Sklar said. “It’s like
fighting human nature. If you’re retired and have a
discretionary income, do you spend it on a vacation with
your grandchildren or on a reserve for a roof replacement in
10 years? That’s the issue: the fight against human nature.”
Pushing back
deadlines
When lawmakers and lobbyists in Florida try to explain how
condo associations have been able to avoid burdensome and
expensive regulations, they often tell the story of the
state’s fire sprinkler mandates.
In 2002, following new national standards on fire safety,
Florida passed a law that gave condos until 2014 to install
fire sprinklers. But many condo associations said the cost
would force them to impose large special assessments that
would price residents out of their homes, make units harder
to sell and threaten buildings’ financial stability.
Condo associations banded together to press lawmakers to
free them of the requirement. New lobbying groups sprung up
to champion the cause, including one formed by several
associations on the Fort Lauderdale coast, and another
created by one the state’s largest and most powerful law
firms.
They argued that condos should have the right to decide for
themselves if it was worth spending hundreds of thousands of
dollars on a project they believed might not significantly
reduce the risk of a fire.
“A lot of people felt the mandate was overreaching,” said
Ellyn Bogdanoff, who represented the Fort Lauderdale area in
the House of Representatives and the Senate as a Republican
from 2004 to 2010 and became a lobbyist on condo issues
after leaving office.
On the other side of the issue were fire inspectors and the
fire safety industry, who wanted the regulations enforced.
Condo lobbyists won a loophole that enables buildings to opt
out of sprinklers in apartments, but that provision still
required the sprinklers in common areas, such as corridors
and lobbies. So the lobbyists convinced lawmakers to extend
the deadline for compliance — first to 2019, and then, as
that date approached, to 2024.
The delay was tacked onto a larger bill concerning community
development and housing, which was signed in 2019 by Gov.
Ron DeSantis, a Republican. (DeSantis’ office did not
respond to a request for comment.)
“They’ve tried every possible way they could to not have to
put fire sprinklers in their buildings,” state Sen. Ed
Hooper, a Republican and a retired firefighter, said. “It’s
very frustrating because I know how effective fire
sprinklers are.”
He said he reluctantly agreed in 2019 “to kick this can down
the road five more years, but I have no intention of kicking
it any further.”
Douglas Buck, a former lobbyist for Florida homebuilders,
said the fire sprinkler issue became an annual punchline in
Tallahassee because extended deadlines often turned up in
pending bills. “I would almost laugh, ‘Here comes a building
code bill and we want to put in a delay to the effective
date when we have to do the sprinklers,’” he said.
Fred Nesbitt, president of the Galt Mile Community
Association, which played a big role in mobilizing condos
against the sprinkler mandate, said he hoped to persuade
lawmakers to pass a full opt-out bill next year.
“Condos have the right of self-determination,” he said. “If
owners vote to do something with their building, they should
be able to do it.”
Repealing mandates
In the wake of the Champlain Towers South disaster, public
attention has turned to a largely forgotten law that experts
say could have helped prevent the collapse. But the law was
eliminated in a series of maneuvers that remain a mystery to
many, even to the lawmakers who backed the repeal.
The law, passed in 2008, required condo associations to hire
engineers or architects to submit reports every five years
about how much it would cost to keep up with repairs, a
process known as a reserve study.
“The intent was to make sure those buildings were being
maintained properly,” said Julio Robaina, who championed the
measure as a Republican member of the state House of
Representatives.
The measure was opposed by condo lawyers and property
managers who said it would cost associations too much money,
he said. It passed only after lawmakers inserted a provision
that allowed condo associations to opt out of the five-year
inspection requirement.
Damage to Miami building was known — but key oversight
process was broken, experts say
The following year, a line seeking to repeal Robaina’s law
turned up in two bills, one in the state Senate and one in
the House of Representatives. The bills were long omnibus
measures concerning regulatory changes but had little else
in common. There are no public records indicating who
advocated for the repeal specifically, and no one spoke
publicly about it. The bills’ sponsors, both of whom have
since left the Legislature, said recently they could not
recall how the repeal line ended up there.
“I don’t know who put it into the bill,” said former Sen.
Michael Bennett, a Republican who left office in 2012 and is
now the supervisor of elections in Manatee County. An
industry lobbyist “probably slid it in there,” he said.
“I have no clue,” former Rep. Trudi Williams, a Republican
and an engineering consultant who left office in 2012, said
in an email.
Neither bill passed both houses of the Legislature; Bennett
and Williams said they did not recall why.
But the repeal line returned the following year, once again
placed into long bills under consideration by the
Legislature. One was sponsored by Bennett, who, again, said
he did not know how it ended up there. The other was
sponsored by Rep. Gary Aubuchon, a Republican homebuilder
and a real estate agent who touted the bill at the time as
having been put together by “the construction coalition,” an
informal group of industry representatives and lobbyists
that submits proposed bills to lawmakers. Aubuchon, who left
the Legislature in 2012, did not respond to requests for
comment.
Several lobbyists who represented condo lawyers and property
managers at the time said they did not push for the repeal.
NBC News sought records of lawmakers’ correspondence on
these bills, but officials said nothing was kept on file
because none of the lawmakers remain in office.
Bennett’s bill was merged with Aubuchon’s, which passed the
Senate and the House of Representatives nearly unanimously.
It was signed into law by then-Gov. Charlie Crist, who had
also signed the 2008 inspection requirement that the new law
eliminated. Crist, a Republican who became an independent in
2010 and is now running for governor as a Democrat,
responded with a statement that did not address his signing
of the bills, but said the state needed more regulation of
older condo buildings.
Even Robaina, who had sponsored the inspection requirement,
voted in favor of repealing it. He said recently that he did
not realize the repeal had been included in the massive
document.
Robaina, who now owns a property management company, said
that if his inspection law had remained intact, it might
have helped save Champlain Towers South from disaster.
The Champlain Towers South Condominium Association
discovered in 2018 that its building had major structural
damage caused by decades of corrosion, and only about
$800,000 to cover major repairs — indications, according to
experts, that the association had put off inspections and
funding of reserves. For the next two years, the
association’s board of directors fought over how to come up
with the $16 million it needed to fix the damage. The board
was seeking bids for the work when the building fell.
Investigators are now trying to determine whether that
damage contributed to the collapse.
“The reserve study would have caught the damage earlier,”
Robaina said. “And with funded reserves, the money would
have been there to pay for it.”
Fending off new penalties
In April 2019, a lobbyist stood before the Florida Senate’s
Committee on Innovation, Industry and Technology and urged
lawmakers not to approve a proposal to make it easier to
file criminal charges against condo board members who accept
kickbacks or subvert residents’ requests for financial
records.
The lobbyist was Mark Anderson, representing the Chief
Executive Officers of Management Companies, a trade
organization for property managers that has been paid more
than $500,000 to influence lawmakers over the past decade,
according to public records.
He told the committee that the new penalties could be
“weaponized” against board members and property managers by
residents who want a seat on the board. He said the bill
would lead to higher attorney fees and make it hard for
associations to attract people to join boards because
potential volunteers would fear being punished for
inadvertent mistakes.
He added that associations were already trying to comply
with new regulations imposed in the wake of a 2016
investigation of South Florida condos by a Miami-Dade County
grand jury, which found regulators failed to protect condo
residents from fraud, secrecy and conflicts of interest by
boards and management companies. The new regulations, passed
in 2017 following initial objections from condo lawyers,
required boards to make it easier to access financial
records and imposed criminal penalties for condo board
election fraud, theft and self-dealing.
“We need to take a breath,” Anderson told the committee.
He was among a group of condo industry lobbyists trying to
head off this first attempt by Pizzo, recently elected to
the state Senate, to impose new regulations, which would
toughen the penalties in the 2017 law and expand them to
other kinds of misconduct. Pizzo had told the lobbyists
about his plans months earlier, when he was still running
for office.
Donna DiMaggio Berger, a lawyer who runs the Community
Association Leadership Lobby, said in an email newsletter
that Pizzo’s bill was “filed at the behest of constituents
who probably never served on their community’s board.”
Anderson and other lobbyists met Pizzo in person several
times, telling him that most condo associations were not
doing anything improper.
Sometimes those meetings “got heated,” Anderson said.
Pizzo, a former prosecutor and a Democrat, said he was
unwilling to go along with backroom arm-twisting on an issue
that meant a lot to him.
“These lobbyists have a way of doing things with a certain
decorum in which they assume everyone is on board and gets
in line,” he said. “Then someone comes along who doesn’t
give a s--- who someone else knows and it’s different.”
Pizzo’s stand failed.
His 2019 bill didn’t make it past the committee stage.
Neither did a 2020 version, or a 2021 version.
Miami board sided with building owners over safety officials
more than half the time
Pizzo said he believes that’s because condo association
lawyers and property managers persuaded Republicans who
don’t have a lot of condos in their district and don’t want
to burden property owners with rules. But he was also a
member of the minority party in Tallahassee, and he didn’t
have a Republican sponsor, which improves a bill’s chance of
passing.
Pizzo said he respects Anderson for sharing his view
publicly. But many lobbyists don’t do that, contacting
lawmakers privately while choosing not to speak at committee
hearings, according to lawmakers and lobbyists.
Travis Moore, a lobbyist for the Community Associations
Institute, which represents condo associations and property
managers and has been paid approximately $320,000 for
Florida lobbying over the past decade, joined Anderson in
opposing Pizzo’s bill. Moore said resistance from industry
lobbyists can make it difficult for lawmakers to get
measures put up for a vote within the Legislature’s 60-day
session. ”Unless it finds its way onto another bill, it’s
not going to happen,” he said.
Now, as the lawmaker who represents the district where the
Champlain Towers South collapse happened, Pizzo is turning
his attention to new regulations that seek to prevent
another disaster.
t the top of his list is extending a Miami-Dade County
requirement for condos to be inspected when they turn 40
years old to make it statewide. He wants to shorten that
time span for buildings near the coasts. And he wants to
sharpen enforcement of existing regulations, including the
requirement that condos get reappraised by insurers every
three years.
Pizzo also wants to try his anti-corruption bills again.
He expects resistance. But after the Surfside collapse, he
said, “it could be different.”
Many lawmakers and lobbyists acknowledge that the Champlain
Towers South collapse will make it more difficult to do
anything perceived as weakening safety standards for condo
buildings. At least, temporarily.
“I don’t think there’s an appetite for that now,” Berger
said.
She has a new agenda: making sure any new regulations
imposed on condo associations are offset by provisions —
such as a state-backed low-interest loan program and
granting associations more power to collect assessment fees
from delinquent unit owners — that will help condos avoid
steep financial losses.
“We don’t want to have legislative tunnel vision that does
things to protect residents but makes it harder to pay for
this stuff,” Berger said.