Editor’s note: Attorneys at Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross, PLLC, respond to questions about Florida community association law. The firm represents community associations throughout Florida and focuses on condominium and homeowner association law, real estate law, litigation, estate planning and business law.
Q: I am on the board in my homeowners’ association and a different master association maintains most the roads. The master association is now refusing to maintain the road in our community, claiming it is our responsibility. How do we figure this out?
—A.T., Jupiter
A: There are three relevant sets of documents. The first set are the governing documents for both the master association and the sub association. If it was the same developer, you would assume there was some scheme of development where the developer would delegate all road maintenance to one entity. This is not legally required, but it is common. These governing documents may specifically state who is responsible for the roads.
The second is the community plats. These plats are essentially the community blueprints and the roadways are depicted on the plats and, more important, plats generally contain maintenance requirements. Thus, the plat should dedicate the roads in your neighborhood to a particular entity, and that dedication is very important. You can find the plats in the County land records.
Third, you need to search the local land records for any sort of cost sharing or maintenance agreement. When you have multiple neighborhoods, there is obviously an economy of scale saving when you have one entity contract to maintain a lot of roads, as opposed to many entities contracting to maintain small portions of roads. Thus, if maintenance was piecemeal at one point, it is possible the various associations entered into an agreement to dictate which entity was responsible to do the work, and then the other entities would contribute towards the maintenance costs based on some formula contained in the documents.
Ultimately, I would recommend you engage a licensed Florida attorney to review all of these documents and analyze the applicable responsibilities.
Q: Our condominium election was just noticed and there are a lot of candidates, all of whom are asking for email lists from the association to campaign. Are they entitled to these lists? Are the incumbent Board members?
—G.R., Stuart
A: Florida Statutes section 718.111 provides that email addresses in the custody of the association are official records. The statute also provides that owners are not permitted to access these email addresses unless the owners waived confidentiality by consenting to receive electronic notice in lieu of mailed notice. In other words, if the owner consents to receiving electronic official notice instead of snail mail, the owner waives the confidentiality of the email address and owners and candidates are entitled to those email addresses. If the owner does not consent to receive official electronic notice, then the email addresses are confidential and should not be provided to any candidate for campaign purposes.
Current directors who also campaigning should not be provided access to the emails unless the usage is related to a mandated board function. So, if the director needs the email addresses to communicate budget updates or rule updates, that may be permissible. But when a director wants email addresses in connection with a campaign, the request is really made more as an owner than as a director. You can see how this may be twisted, but the rule is ultimately that email addresses are confidential in the custody of the association unless the owner waived confidentiality, in which case candidates would be entitled to those non-confidential email addresses.
John C. Goede Esq. is co-founder and shareholder of the Law firm Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross, PLLC. Please visit our website www.gadclaw.com, or to ask questions about your issues for future columns send your inquiry to: question@gadclaw.com.
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