Florida Condo & HOA Legal Blog : Florida Condo Lawyer & Attorney : Becker & Poliakoff Law Firm : Condominium & HOA Law Blog

I am President of a 324 door condominium association in Jacksonville, FL. We are suffering from the same financial problems that most condo associations are feeling and it is a day to day struggle to pay the bills. We recently submitted a petition to the Duval County Circuit Court, via Judge Jean M. Johnson, for blanket receivership authorization to collect rents directly from tenants whose landlords are in arrears to the association. Our documents give us that authority. We have about 20 units that fall into that category and the amount of fees owned by those particular dead-beat owners is significant; well in excess of $100,000.
There has never been a blanket receivership ruling in Duval County and Judge Johnson, in her infinite wisdom, saw fit to decline our petition. She based her decision on an obscure ruling from Dade County that really had no bearing on our case or the receivership issue as far as that goes. She completely ignored the list of successful rulings for receivership petitions from Dade, Orange, Palm, and other Florida counties supplied by our attorney. Obviously, her law clerk did not use our attorney's documentation when writing the opinion for Judge Johnson.
It is hard for me to understand how anyone who is a county circuit court judge could be so ignorant of, and/or insensitive to, the financial plight of condominium associations to the point that they would let dead-beats go on making money at the expense of responsible bill paying citizens. As you know, every dollar shorted the associations by these dead-beats has to come out of the pockets of the owners who pay their bills. In 2009 alone our responsible debt paying owners had to make up over $150,000 in bad debt – unpaid association fees. That bad debt caused a significant increase in our 2010 monthly association maintenance fees. Unfortunately, we can only look forward to similar bad debt numbers in 2010. Combine that with falling appraisal values that prevent us from selling our condos and moving on to other real estate choices and we are in a dead end Catch 22 situation. And now our circuit court judge is too ignorant to understand the problem she is helping perpetuate! Unfortunately, she does not run for re-election until 2014. I can only hope that new laws are passed that will help community associations in the years to come. Perhaps that will enlighten Judge Johnson to the fact that something is really going on out there in the real world.

I fully support Bill 1196. LCAM in Palm Beach, Florida
since 1997. I am semi-retired and manage a small (6) unit
condo located in an Addison Mizner Historic Building. The
point is one must deal with laws that impact the real world
now.