Una traducción española está disponible en Web site: www.TAJWatchSpanish.blogspot.com
Our poor Board of Directors. After the annual election in March there were
- four incumbents (including one who never attended a meeting the whole year and had no meaningful participation) and
- three brand new members for a seven person BOD that had experience from the old-timers and energy from the new-comers.
- Immediately after the election the inactive member (Levy) quit and the BOD was then down to six, but it did not seem like anything was really lost.
- And then the most experienced and knowledgeable member (the ousted former President, Salomon) quit and the BOD was down to five.
- Then one of the brand new members quit (Alvarez) and it was down to four.
- Three brand-new replacements (Capobianco, Morgenstern, Vermut) were appointed and the BOD was brought back up to seven.
- Next, another newly elected member quit (Fabozzi) and it was back to six.
- Then one of the newly appointed members quit (Capobianco) and it dwindled down to five.
- In a cruel twist of fate, the appointments were challenged and overturned by the State of Florida and so now the BOD is back to three. Ironically, for some time now the most active and well-informed of the remaining few BOD members is the one with the least experience (President W2ndy H1ll).
There will be another attempt on August 18th to fully staff the BOD. The candidates are a colorful group of ten unit owners with widely different temperaments, experience, and possibly agendas (we are still hoping to read their candidate statements and see them at a meet-the-candidates night). But regardless of who wins the election, the BOD will be a nearly brand-new group that will have to work-out its pecking-order and figure-out how to get work done.
And there is lots of work to get done. There is the normal run-of-the-mill work that every BOD faces:
- property insurance procurement
- yearly budget creation/allocation
- rule enforcement
- legal & ethical compliance issues
- property maintenance & beautification
- unit owner relations
- committee oversight
- information dissemination.
This new BOD will also face some significant challenges, such as:
- getting someone, anyone, to keep and post proper meeting minutes (the last minutes posted on the official TAJ webpage are dated 14 April 2008, and they do not include the required information of motions made and votes cast. Minutes of subsequent meetings are missing altogether)
- replacing key personnel (it has been five months since Bette Ann resigned and we still do not have a property manager; five months since Charlotte left and we still do not have anyone on staff with construction/accounting knowledge and experience)
- re-establishing procedures for building refurbishments (we are mid-stream in a community-wide construction project that has come to a halt and nearly all [if not all] the personnel who accumulated the knowledge and established the procedures have been marginalized)
- performing due-diligence catch-up with the Association and Individual Unit Owners' Accounting (We still do not have the required annual year-end audit completed. Furthermore, I believe that we do not even have regular monthly reconciliation statements for the past several months. Apparently we went a year with an accounting service that did not keep very close track of major money matters such as Special Assessments, Monthly Maintenance payments, delinquencies, etc. We now have a brand-new accounting firm to take on the task of balancing our books. Our experience has been that our books are unrealistically cumbersome, because of the 47 separate condominiums. Worse than that, our Special Assessment payment plans are complicated and somewhat inconsistent because of the various payment options that have been extended to accommodate unit owners. Furthermore, there are some owners who refused to pay their Special Assessments [choosing, instead, to go to court to try to avoid paying] leaving their neighbors to pay their share. Someone has to keep track of all that information so that when the money is eventually collected it can be accurately distributed to the appropriate unit owners who paid extra when their neighbor did not).
Of the four major challenges listed above, I think that the accounting should be the first and biggest priority. TAJ had some serious problems almost twenty years ago due to bad accounting and theft (click here to read one of several articles from the Miami Herald about this subject). The story that I have copied below is about another Association that had funds stolen. I think that most people would agree that although it might be unpleasant, we can live with brown grass, uneven mows, mis-matches of building colors, and lax enforcement of community rules of many types. But what nobody ever wants to live with is the mis-management and/or poor accounting of our money. We object not only to the theft of hundreds-of-thousands of dollars, we also feel cheated and angry if we have to pay even an extra one-hundred-dollars just because someone made an accounting mistake (like forgetting to consolidate a construction loan to reduce the interest, or not separating one unit's expenses from the neighbors' who are on a different payment plan, or not keeping track of one neighbor's lack of payment of his Special Assessments and maintenance fees from three years ago, etc.)
As a tale of caution, I have copied an article (and added bold highlights) that is found on a website named Cyber Citizens for Justice, Florida. It shows what can possibly go wrong if we do not make certain that appropriate procedures are followed. Click on the article's title to read it at its original site.
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Article Courtesy of The Sun Sentinel
By Joe Kollin
Published July 11, 2008
Owners in a Davie condo community will urge a judge to "throw away the key" Aug. 1 when he sentences their former president for stealing $759,654 from their treasury.
"He robbed us blind. He doesn't deserve to breathe the same air we do. The judge should throw away the key," Peter Trampani Sr. said Thursday about Christopher John Winkelholz, 27.
Davie police arrested Winkelholz on Oct. 29 on charges of forgery and theft from the 264-unit Whitehall at Pine Island Ridge condo association, where he was president, and the 7,000-member Pine Island Ridge Country Club, where he was vice president.
On May 29 he pleaded no contest to two counts of grand theft and two counts of passing forged checks between June 2005 and October 2007. Broward Circuit Judge Pedro Dijols set the sentencing date for next month.
Although the maximum he faces is 70 years — 30 years on each of the grand theft charges and five years on the forgeries — state sentencing guidelines recommend four to five years.
Trampani, 74, vice president of the Whitehall condo association, said he and dozens of his neighbors plan to ask to speak at the sentencing hearing. They want to persuade the judge to sentence Winkelholz to the maximum by describing the effects his crimes are having, especially on retirees living on fixed incomes.
He said the stolen money amounts to about $3,000 for each unit in the condo association.
"People here worked all their lives and now, with the economy, don't know if they can pay for food and prescriptions," Trampani said. "They are coming in crying because they can't pay their maintenance. Don't you think they could use that $3,000? Couldn't you use $3,000? I'm going to get up there and make sure the judge knows. What's happening here brings a tear to your eye."
Trampani said Winkelholz doesn't deserve leniency. He said Winkelholz never offered to make restitution and hasn't returned records the association needs. "We're still trying to recover from what he did."
Winkelholz has been in jail since his arrest. Police said he was a flight risk because his passport and bags, indicating he was bound for Argentina, were in his car when he was arrested. On April 2, the judge reversed himself and set bail at $502,000, but Winkelholz never posted it.
The case against him is one of three brought last year by police departments in Broward, just as state Rep. Julio Robaina, R- Miami, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle and state condo ombudsman Danille R. Carroll were beginning to teach law enforcement agencies about condo crimes. Until then, agencies generally turned away owners suspicious of their boards, saying the problems were civil, not criminal, cases.
Hallandale Beach police arrested four people after owners in Parker Plaza Estates, an oceanfront high-rise, hired an attorney to help them outline an alleged kickback scheme by directors and employees. Charged with organized fraud were association President Joseph Greenberg, now 84, association manager Robert Hittner, 60, maintenance supervisor Angel Ramos, 79, and Fort Lauderdale plumbing contractor Ira Silver, 63. Prosecutors contend they schemed to siphon an estimated $1.4 million from the treasury of the 520-apartment condo.
Greenberg pleaded no contest in October and was ordered to repay the association $250,000, serve seven years' probation and forfeit ownership of his apartment. The three others are free on bail while awaiting trial.
Hollywood police on Aug. 27 arrested Doris Weinstein, 64, former president of the Quadomain condo association at 2201 S. Ocean Drive, on a charge of grand theft. Police said Weinstein used association money to pay health insurance premiums for herself and her husband. The coverage was worth more than $13,000 over 30 months, police said. She is free on bail while awaiting trial. If convicted, she could face five years in prison.
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Make no mistake. I do not think that anyone on our BOD now or in the recent past has been dishonest. I do not think that any of the candidates are dishonest. But history teaches us that even good people can falter in the face of temptation and there is just no good reason to let it become an issue. Proper accounting of the millions of dollars that TAJ accumulates is so important that it is worth doing right.
If we ever wonder whether we can afford to pay the experts to make certain it is done right, let's consider the alternative and then ask if we can afford not to.
