In the end, legislators couldn’t face the prospect of forcing thousands of condominium owners across Florida to be subjected to massive fees for repairs of their aging buildings.
A late-session amendment to a condo reform bill by the Senate on Thursday included strict new inspections of aging condominium buildings but removed the requirements for condominiums to hold money in reserve to pay for repairs.
The House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Danny Perez, R-Miami, declared the change unacceptable, warning that it would not help avoid future tragedies, like the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside last June. He declared the effort dead for the session.
“We believe in the House that the bill we passed off the House floor was going to get us as close as ever to making sure that the incident that took place at Surfside never happened again,’’ said Perez. He said that while he was confident “that the Senate is in agreement with the fact that something has to be done, unfortunately, this couldn’t be the year that we do it.”
The assessment facing condo owners at Champlain Towers South for its 40-year recertification exceeded $15 million. After postponing major repairs and arguing over costs, owners were hit with massive special assessments.
Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, who sponsored the Senate bill, did not respond to requests for comment. Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, a Naples Republican who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, was not willing to declare the measure dead for the session, as lawmakers have until midnight to reach an agreement.
“The proverbial ball is in the House’s court,’’ she said Friday.
If legislators fail to come to agreement on the measure that leaves the state’s uneven condominium inspections laws in place. Real estate experts say that insurance companies and financial institutions will now impose reserve requirements on buildings, stepping in where state officials have been absent.
2 million people live in condos older than 30 years
There are an estimated 2 million people living in more than 912,000 condominium units that are 30 years old or older. Of the 1.5 million condo units in Florida, another 131,773 are 20 to 30 years old, and more than 105,000 condo units are more than 50 years old.
But under current law, only Miami-Dade and Broward counties and some individual cities require regular inspections of condos to ascertain their structural integrity. The proposed legislation would have attempted to change that.
SB 1702, sponsored by Bradley, and SB 7042 by the Senate Regulated Industries Committee, and HB 7069 by Perez and the House Pandemics and Public Emergencies Committee both incorporated recommendations for more frequent building inspections, as outlined by the Surfside Working Group’s Florida Building Professionals Recommendations.