CLEARWATER BEACH — Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation Monday designed to provide financial relief to condominium owners who have faced serious financial strains from tightened regulations enacted following the 2021 Surfside condo collapse in South Florida.
That tragedy, in which a 12-story condominium in northeast Miami-Dade County collapsed without warning, killing 98 people, prompted the Legislature to pass a law in 2022 that mandated that all condo developments undergo certain inspections—with condominium associations ordered to maintain sufficient reserve funds to repair maintenance problems revealed in those inspections.
To pay for those repairs, condo associations began tapping unit owners with expensive special assessments and higher monthly fees, leading to complaints from condo owners that they were being forced out of their homes because of those increased costs.
The legislative response (HB 913) signed by the governor on Monday allows associations to secure credit lines and invest funds to pay for building repairs instead of immediately raising large amounts of cash from owners. It carves out condos with only three residential stories from those inspections. And it extends the deadline for certain associations to have a structural integrity reserve study completed by Dec. 31, 2025, rather than Dec. 31, 2024.
“People need to be able to afford to live in these units and, especially if they’re getting assessments on things that maybe they do need to be done but it isn’t like the integrity of the structure is at risk here, they need to be able to work those out, and you shouldn’t have this mandate applied in that way,” DeSantis said while hosting a press conference at Island Way Grill on Clearwater Beach.
The governor began calling for the Legislature to deal with the emerging problems resulting from the 2022 condo legislation last summer, but lawmakers resisted his efforts. Then-Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said last August that the issue could be addressed during the regular legislative session, and she and outgoing House Speaker Paul Renner resisted a second request DeSantis made while holding a roundtable discussion on the issue in Pinellas County last September.
Flash forward to this January, when DeSantis again called on lawmakers to address the issue as part of a special legislative session that would also deal with immigration, reforms to citizen-led constitutional amendments, and hurricane relief. And again, the Legislature rebuffed his request.
“I know a lot of people were really disappointed in the leadership, particularly in the House of Representatives, for not being willing to address it at that time and, quite frankly, it didn’t look that promising through a lot of the legislative session,” the governor said Monday, before adding that the condo-owning public motivated lawmakers to pass something of substance this year.
“I think that this will provide some relief, but it’s also a very complicated set of issues that you’re dealing with, and if this legislation takes hold on July 1, hopefully we’ll see a lot of good things, but to the extent that there needs to be some cleanup next year when the Legislature reconvenes, we’d got to be willing to do that,” he said.
“We all attempted to make sure that there was never a collapse again, like what happened at Surfside” said Clearwater Republican Sen. Ed Hooper. “We overreacted, probably, and now it’s time to make the change. People were losing their homes. Elderly people were losing their condos because they could not afford to make the increase and their monthly HOA [home owner association] fees. That’s just wrong.”
DeSantis signed a second bill (HB 393) Monday revising the My Safe Florida Condo Pilot Project. The new law prohibits a condo association from applying for a grant or an inspection under the program unless it has complied with milestone inspection and structural integrity reserve requirements.
It now says that only 75% of unit owners, rather than 100%, must approve applying for the grant. It revises the roof improvements eligible for funding and clarifies that all grants under the program must be matched on the basis of $1 provided by the condo associations for every $2 provided by the state towards the actual cost of the program.
Ronni Drimmer is president of a condominium association board at a 55-plus community in Clearwater. She thanked the governor for providing relief for condo owners, but went a bit off script to say that she wished the legislation could do something about the high cost of property insurance at her building.
“At the moment, we don’t have hurricane insurance because they raised the deductible so high at $600,000,” she said. “Then it doesn’t really pay for insurance when a roof is only $500,000. So we’re in a little bit of a precarious situation right now, so I’m hoping something will be done about that.”
Along with Hooper, other Pinellas Republicans in attendance included state Sen. Nick DiCeglie and state Reps. Kim Berfield and Linda Chaney.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
1 comment on this item
Only paid subscribers can comment
Please log in to comment by clicking here.
lib224
Looks like it will do nothing for our condo association. We are replacing all the roofs in hope of a lower insurance rate. Our current deductible is so high that it rarely pays for anything, including the last three major storms. Monthly fees are now equal to a mortgage payment.
Wednesday, June 25 Report this