Elected officials on Friday announced state legislation that would criminalize corruption affecting homeowners associations and condo owners.
Coined the Community Association Bill of Rights, the proposed bill would reduce association election fraud, give owners greater access to records and outlaw the acceptance of kickbacks by association leaders.
“We need to protect the integrity of the voting process, particularly since some associations in Florida, like The Hammocks, firstly function like small municipalities,” said State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle.
Fernandez Rundle spoke out last year in November when Hammocks board members were charged with stealing more than $2 million from the West Kendall condominium community.
(Samantha Morell for Biscayne Times)
State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced on March 3 a newly proposed set of bills that would criminalize corruption within homeowners associations.
“We made the law mirror our state laws on public elections. Our records reforms are desperately needed to give homeowners and condo owners transparency to the association records. In our experience, access to association financial records allow owners to expose wrongdoing long before amounts of money can disappear or be stolen,” she said.
Current law allows homeowners and condo owners access to records, such as credit card statements, invoices, receipts and deposit statements. Still, Fernandez Rundle acknowledges that enforcement is weak and requires filing a civil lawsuit.
The new legislation, if passed, would require the appointment of a public custodian to handle records requests for homeowners associations and make it a felony for anybody who fails to produce the requested documents.
Additionally, the bill proposes that any complaint to local police or the Department of Business and Professional Regulation be automatically forwarded to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as well.
Joining Fernandez Rundle at the March 3 press conference were Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, County Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez and Rep. Juan-Carlos Porras, who is sponsoring the bill alongside Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez.
“[The bill] assures that board members are criminally responsible for any monetary damages, including embezzlement, including voluntary theft … We want to make sure that our agencies can handle the work across the state and that these abuses are kept out and that bad actors are put away,” said Porras.
More than 50% of Florida’s 22.5 million residents live in condos or homeowners associations. Approximately 3 million people live in one of the state’s 1.5 million condominiums, while 9.65 million people live in one of 49,000 HOAs.
"We are working to try to protect our homeowners from, well, basically from governments, really small governments that are making critical decisions on their behalf, and there hasn't been adequate access to that information and transparency,” Levine Cava said.
Gonzalez sponsored a resolution March 7 at a Board of County Commissioners meeting that will encourage the Florida Legislature to enact the proposed laws. The Legislature is scheduled to convene from March 7 to May 5.
“It is due to the perseverance, the passion and the relentlessness of homeowners who had the courage to speak up,” said Gonzalez at Friday’s conference. “Ladies and gentlemen, let this be a lesson to our county, to our country and to our state that if you want something done, you can speak up and your public servants will hear you.”
The county also created a zero-interest fund through which homeowners and condo owners can apply for a loan of up to $50,000 to cover costs for special assessments and other building recertification fees.
Also present at the news conference was Ana Danton, a resident of The Hammocks.
“It was a reign of terror,” she said, remembering how her association would sue anybody who spoke out for defamation. “People here were hostages.”
Gonzalez and residents of The Hammocks plan to travel to Tallahassee to advocate for the bill to be passed.