No Special Session to Address Condos

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The new leaders in the Florida Legislature said Tuesday that they have no intention of calling a special session to address condo owners' worries that the cost of safety mandates the Legislature imposed after the Champlain Towers South collapse will drive them out of their homes.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has been pushing for lawmakers to take up the matter before the end of the year, but outgoing Senate President Kathleen Passidomo nixed that.

Addressing reporters during the Florida Legislature's post-election organizational session, newly installed House Speaker Daniel Perez, a Republican from Miami, said solutions for the condo crisis will come during the new year.

"When people call for a special session, very quick to pull the trigger on saying special session. But we should think about what is the topic and the solutions that we're trying to solve for in that session. I think we'll have that discussion once we get to January in committees," Perez said.

At issue is a 2022 law passed during a special session requiring certain condominiums in Florida to be inspected before the end of 2024. Condo owners and residents have expressed concerns that they will face increased costs due to repairs required by the inspections.

The law was intended to prevent condo association boards from delaying structural inspections and repairs — problems blamed for the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside in 2021, killing 98 people.

"The question shouldn't be 'When?' The question should be 'What?' What is the solution that people are offering to the issue before condos?" Perez said.

Now Senate President Ben Albritton signaled he, too, wants committees to convene in January to more thoroughly formulate an approach.

DeSantis' discussions

DeSantis made an effort to formulate a condo solution before two major hurricanes slammed the state and went on tour campaigning against proposed state constitutional amendments 3 and 4. He hosted two round table discussions with lawmakers, business owners, and condo HOAs to "get the best ideas" in September.

"But we do need to do something this year," DeSantis said in September. "I don't think this is something that you can just put off to next March or April, I think there are a lot of looming deadlines, and we've got to have a plan forward to be able to keep people in their units if that's what they want to do. And we want to continue to stand strong for safety."

The governor made his stance clear after Passidomo released a formal statement against a special session.

Passidomo's successor, Albritton, emphasized that the body should "dig in deeply and heavily" on a solution during the regular session, calling on senators with subject-matter expertise to leverage it.

"I'm happy and my colleagues are happy and thrilled that the governor has a sense of urgency about this issue. And what I want to say to you is that so does the Florida Senate," Albritton said Tuesday during a media availability following the Senate organizational session.

"Our goal is to provide the most amount of exposure to this for Floridians, so we can hear the most we can from them to learn about this," Albritton said.

"We're going to dig in very heavily on this. We're going make certain that we know as much as humanly possible, through the complexity of this and how it's going to impact Floridians, and especially those living in condos," he said.

South Florida Sen. Jason Pizzo, a Democrat, said he will host a summit with Sen. Jennifer Bradley, a Republican from rural Northeast Florida, in Boca Raton to sort through condo concerns.

"The greatest concern that we have with the Dec. 31 deadline is that we have engineers, attorneys, architects, CPAs, property managers, and realtors interpreting the plain reading of those two condo bills with great and wide disparity. Which is very dangerous and can be very expensive," Pizzo told reporters Tuesday.

The summit is set for Florida Atlantic University on Dec. 3, Pizzo said.

"We have attorneys giving wildly disparate opinions and different interpretations about what [condo improvement] means," Pizzo said.

"We have CPAs who are not telling associations that there's starkly different tax implications between a loan vs. an assessment," Pizzo said. "We have engineers complaining about other engineers. Attorneys complaining about other attorneys. CPAs the same — everyone's going to get in the room, we're going to hash it out and move forward."

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