DeSantis in Sweetwater: High Alert! How to save the homes of thousands of Floridians in crisis.

Good morning, Miami-Dade County. You do have, full disclosure, a cafecito-infused governor this morning, just so everybody knows, buckle up. I’m joined with Melanie Griffin, who’s our DBPR secretary.

We have Dade County Commissioner Renee Garcia, Hialeah Resident and Condo Association President Kevin Patrick Cortina, and we have Elizabeth Garcia, condo owner here in Miami. We also have Commissioner Diaz, who’s joining us, and other dignitaries. So I want to thank everybody for coming.

I don’t need to tell people here in Southern Florida, we’ve got a problem with our condo market right now. We have a problem that was introduced by legislation that was passed in recent years by the Florida legislature, and if you go back and look at the genesis of why that happened, we remember the Surfside, we remember things. The intentions of the legislation were good.

I think they were trying to prevent, potentially, another major tragedy, and we all remember how gut-wrenching it was to watch the aftermath of Surfside, not knowing whether you could have survivors for days and days hoping. It was a really traumatic moment for the state. So I understand why people wanted to see something done.

Now, I remember at the time, people were asking me, you know, and I was like, well, we don’t even know definitively what caused the Surfside thing. If you do something without knowing that, you could end up with some unintended consequences, and so the time I said, you know, legislature should talk to their folks, they should figure out what they want to do. I’m not going to stand in the way of it, but I also know we’re going to have to have an open mind on this, and you may have to come back and revisit some of the things that were done if there are some unintended consequences.

Well, here we are today, and we have seen some of these consequences. We have seen sudden, high-cost fee assessments that have been imposed on condo owners, many of whom in South Florida, particularly in this community, are senior citizens and living on fixed incomes. And so these are people that have been in a condo for 20, 30 years, probably own it free and clear, thinking, and obviously they’ve had to deal with inflation and all these other aspects of life for the last four years.

Hopefully that’s going to abate, but then they’re told, oh, by the way, pony up $100,000 for an assessment. Where are they going to get that money? So you’re putting people in jeopardy of losing their homes, and that should not be anything that we want to be doing in the state of Florida. So we have been meeting with folks.

We were down in Southern Florida about six or seven months ago. We’ve hosted roundtables. We’ve solicited input.

We’ve spoken with members of the Florida legislature about, okay, what are the issues that need to be addressed? How can we address it? And then we need to address it. We’ve got to provide relief for people. We do have a responsibility to do this.

Now, we saw this last year building up. Everybody knew that there were going to be assessments rendered. I actually called for a special session of the Florida legislature in January to address, yes, illegal immigration, yes, some hurricane relief, but also the condo issue.

I thought we needed to give people peace of mind right at the start of the year. We need to make sure that they had relief from these crippling assessments and make sure that people were able to stay in their homes. You know, the Florida House of Representatives did not want to take up any condo relief legislation at the time.

They said it wasn’t urgent, that it was something that may or may not need to be addressed in regular session, and so here we are. Legislative session only has a few more weeks left. There has not been meaningful action in the Florida House of Representatives to give Floridians relief from the condo crisis that the legislation itself has caused, and we’ve got to be willing to step up and do the right thing.

Now, the Florida Senate has put forth a proposal that actually addresses a lot of the concerns that we’ve heard from Floridians across the state. It’s incorporated ideas that we provided, and I have no pride of ownership of this. You know, we gave ideas to the senators.

We said, here’s what people are telling us. You guys are talking to people you guys have ideas to, and your ideas are better, some of mine are good, whatever, let’s just get the job done, and so we have been working with these stakeholders. Now, the Senate’s current bill includes reforms to increase accountability of condo association managers.

It strengthens electronic participation requirements while reinforcing strict voting integrity laws in place to ensure secure elections. It adds increased transparency for residents and creates annual analyses of milestone inspection reports to create a data-driven approach to condo safety, and crucially, it provides more flexibility for associations to phase reserve funding and use alternative funding methods, including investing contributions to generate more money for required repairs, and so that would provide relief from these crippling assessments, and, you know, we shouldn’t be in the business of mandating that these assessments must be levied on folks.

I think you have reform of condo governance, you have transparency, and then the residents are able to make the decisions that they think are in the best interest of themselves.

Obviously, if you’re a property owner, you don’t want to see the property go down the tubes. I mean, you do have a vested interest in making sure, but you also have to do it in a way that’s going to be feasible and economically sustainable. So I applaud the Senate for doing this.

Senator Ileana Garcia is leading the bill. She’s from here in South Florida. I thank them for doing that, and there may be other things that are added to it.

Like I said, I don’t have pride of ownership. I just want to get the job done for people of Florida. I want people to be able to stay in their homes.

I think it’s really important that people are not being forced to sell or forced to leave. And here’s the thing. Some people will say, well, you know, these folks in there, you know, they have the assessments, and yeah, they’re on fixed income, but they bought the condo 30 years ago, so it’s worth a lot more.

They can make money if they sell. The problem is, is, okay, they sell it. Where do they go? Every house in Miami costs more.

Every condo. I mean, it isn’t like they’re getting a windfall and then can buy something that’s very affordable You know, they would have to potentially buy something that’s very expensive, and maybe that’s moderating now, and there’s, you know, who knows what will happen, but I think you would end up functionally, if someone’s forced to sell, particularly elderly, I don’t think they would have, many of them would not have a place to go to be able to buy a new place to live. And so that should be a concern of ours.

Now the House’s current bill doesn’t include any reforms to increase accountability of condo association managers. It creates a more costly and burdensome process for removing board members. It actually weakens electronic voting system requirements, thereby inviting more opportunities for fraud.

It does not add increased transparency or comprehensive data evaluation regarding the milestone inspection reports, and it does not provide more flexibility for associations to phase funding for certain components of the structural integrity reserve study, but it rather allows a board to approve assessments and loans without owner approval. Largely, the House’s condo bill seems to be something that favors developers and puts the interests of developers over the interests of Florida residents. That is unacceptable.

If these associations can’t make improvements and the buildings are clearly obsolete, the value of the real estate that they are built upon may outweigh the investment. The problem is many seniors and middle-class condo residents can be displaced and ultimately may not have a place to call home. And so why are we even entertaining a situation where people are going to be put in that awful predicament? And here’s the thing.

Things happen in life, right? There’s things, so many things that we cannot control in state government that happens, that it can impact people. But this is something that was created by legislation. This would not be happening without legislation that had been passed years ago.

And so let’s recognize that, let’s recognize that these consequences are not what we want, and let’s provide reforms to be able to keep people in their condo units. That’s what I have heard overwhelmingly from Florida residents. And we’ve been dealing with this issue now for, you know, close to a year where we had folks that have been really concerned about it.

And our job as elected officials is to listen and to provide solutions. And not everything can be solved through legislation, but I can tell you if there’s a problem created by legislation, we don’t only have the ability, we have a duty to rectify that. And so I want to thank the folks in the Florida Senate who’ve moved credible legislation forward.

I don’t know what has gotten into the Florida House of Representatives. You know, they campaign on our Florida success, saying they’re going to support the Florida model. And then they get in, and they seem to be working to sabotage the great work that Florida has done over these last six years.

I mean, remember, they fought me, the Florida House fought me, when I said Florida needs to be enlisted to help President Trump enforce immigration laws. They tried to make Florida a de facto sanctuary state. Now there was outrage from the public, people were not happy with that, and so we ended up getting strong legislation, and we’re now leading the country on that.

What else does the Florida House of Representatives do? They’ve actually joined with Democrats to undo spending reductions that I instituted in the budget last June. They’ve given over $60 million of excessive spending in this current year’s budget, joining with Democrats to do that and to undo our cost savings that we instituted. That’s not what you voted for.

That is not what they told you they would do. when they were running and seeking your vote in elections. What is their main thing that they’re trying to accomplish this session in the Florida House? It seems to me, if you look at all the things that are on the agenda, is they’re trying to contort Florida law to be able to benefit liberal trial lawyers.

They want to undo tort reform. They want to provide windfalls for these lawyers who will do cases where the lawyers make all the money and the client gets very little. That is not going to be good for consumers.

That is not going to be good for our economy. It’s not going to be good for jobs. We should not turn over the state of Florida to the liberal trial bar.

That is not what you voted for. That’s not what they told you that they would do when they ran for election. We believe in putting Floridians first.

That’s what we’ve done for six years. That’s why the state is number one in economy, number one in education. That’s why we have a 50-year low in the crime rate.

That’s why we were the first state to stand up and defeat the woke agenda. That’s why we’ve led on issue after issue. The one thing I can tell you with me is, when I tell you I’m going to do something, and certainly when I was seeking your vote in 22 for another term as governor, I didn’t just say that stuff.

I meant it. I got into office again, and I did it, and I delivered on that. I think what they’re playing a very dangerous game in the Florida House, because they think that they can run one way, get into office, and then behave in a totally different way than what the voters thought that they were getting when they did.

I’ve been disappointed to see some. They actually have a bill. We’ve got some great folks that have helped us really reform our universities.

We have former Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nunez is now the president at Florida International University. That’s a fantastic selection. We’ve been very clear that the people of Florida, they want good universities, but they don’t want universities that are going to be indoctrination centers.

They don’t want Columbia University and what goes on there to go on in the state of Florida. We’ve taken that to heart for many, many years. We said we are not going to allow these universities to be hijacked by woke ideology.

We’re going to make sure we have strong leadership in all these universities. The job of the university is to educate, not to indoctrinate, and we need to make sure these universities are fulfilling the classical mission of what a university should be, to teach folks to think for themselves, to have academic integrity, and ultimately to prepare these students to be citizens of our great republic. That is what we need to be doing, and we’ve done more than any other state in the country to do that.

What’s the Florida House of Representatives doing? They’re actually trying to pursue legislation that would roll back all the progress we’ve made of fighting the woke and the leftists in our state universities. They actually have a provision that says the governor and his staff are not allowed to discuss any vacancies of university presidents. And so what, they’re just supposed to be able to hire some flamboyant liberal president and we’re just supposed to sit and take it as Floridians? No, you elected me to make sure that these universities are in line, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

So what I see over and over again with what they’re doing is, you know, they’re not trying to defeat the leftists, which have caused so many problems around this country. You look at what the decline in New York City, Chicago, California, Illinois, it’s all rooted in leftism and leftist ideology. And we in Florida have gone totally different and we’ve had success where they’ve had failures.

And I see the Florida House trying to throw the leftists a lifeline. Don’t give them a lifeline. We don’t want leftism in the state of Florida.

We want to make sure that our Florida model continues to carry the day. So this has kind of been par for the course, unfortunately, with what they’ve done in the Florida House. But this is important on the condos.

People are hurting. People need relief. They are being put in predicaments through no fault of their own.

They are being put in predicament because of legislation that was passed. And while good intention, you have to be willing to look at it at this point and realize we need some reform. We need some changes.

So I commend everyone that’s worked hard. And there are individual members in the Florida House who’ve worked incredibly hard on this. There are obviously many individual senators who’ve worked very hard on this.

The Senate is willing to to put forward, I think, a credible proposal. I hope it continues to go through. But we can’t take no for an answer.

What are you going to tell the folks as they as they lose their their their condos and get forced out? You could tell them tough luck. I don’t think that that works. I don’t think that’s acceptable.

It’s not the right thing to do. So thanks, everybody, who’s been involved in this fight. I know people have been concerned about this for many, many months, if not even years since this legislation is passed.

And this is important for South Florida. This is important for our elderly. So let’s get it right.

OK, we’re going to hear from some of our folks. Melanie, come on up. Thank you, Governor.

Good morning. As said, I’m Melanie Griffin and I have the honor of leading the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which oversees more than one point seven million licensees and professionals and more than twenty eight thousand condominium associations. The department has 13 offices across the state that have worked incredibly hard to help our condo community, including unit owners, board members and more.

And we have been there for all three years of the condo reform that have been passed in the wake of the Surfside tragedy in twenty twenty one. These measures are aimed at accountability and safety, and they’ve had a cumulative effect and unit owners need relief now. We have worked hard to get data to help our stakeholders really understand what our community and unit owners are seeing in the condominium associations.

And what it shows is there is an average assessment of approaching twenty thousand dollars, oftentimes more than fifty thousand dollars, like the governor said, one hundred thousand dollars. And what we want to prevent another tragedy like Surfside, we have got to put forth solutions that help Floridians not hurt them. I echo the governor’s sentiment.

The Senate has emerged with a solution that balances Floridians well-being without burdening them. And I personally know this because I’ve watched senators have several town halls across the state for months now, and they have also spent many hours with our staff looking at legislation and proposals that would truly help our communities and our citizens. Let me tell you a little bit about the few highlights from the Senate version that we’ve been seeing throughout this legislative session.

First, the bill extends the reserve study requirement for one year, and that would give immediate relief to Floridians and relieve them from the burden of these heavy financial assessments. Second, the bill provides alternative funding methods. It gives associations flexibility to meet reserve funding requirements, including an on-ramp for funding things that already have a useful life that will help those residents for several more years.

It also builds upon previous legislation to increase transparency, empowering unit owners to have access to their financial records they’ve been denied from seeing for so long. Next, it holds condo board members and community association managers acting in bad faith directly accountable without penalizing our unit owners. And finally, the Senate proposal requires condo associations to report information about their property to the department, which will give the state a more accurate picture of what is going on with our condominiums in Florida.

This year’s legislation will be the fourth reform after the Surfside tragedy. And with this much legislation, we have got to get it right if we’re going to take a fourth bite at the apple. Floridians need help not to have their problems exacerbated.

And with that, let’s help the governor and the legislature and put Floridians first and keep people in their homes. Thank you. Thank you, Governor and Madam Secretary and Mayor.

It’s great to be here in your home in Sweetwater. And look, the important thing when we talk about condo legislation, when I was in the Senate, we worked to reform the condo laws. We wanted to make sure that we brought transparency to the laws.

We want to make sure because there were so many issues happening with condos in our community. And when we talk about condos, it’s not just about Miami Beach and Brickell. It’s about interiors, about Sweetwater, Hialeah, the city of Miami, down south, and there’s people, these are people, hardworking individuals who are working every day to make sure they can keep a roof over their heads.

And unfortunately, the reserve requirements, while well-intentioned, when they pass because of Surfside, are putting a huge burden on our people, on our working men and women, on our families, who now are finding themselves in a situation where they’re forcing their hand to sell these condos. And yet, the market is not picking up these condos, so they’re losing money on these condos that they’ve invested so much money on. And this is why I think it’s important with the legislation that we have now before us in the Senate, where the Senate is extending the time for these reserve requirements.

They are bringing funding flexibility, which those two items themselves, I’m not going to go through the whole detail of the bill, but those two items themselves give actual relief, immediate relief, to our members, to our working families in this community. So this is why it’s important, and Mayor, Governor, I do thank you for taking the lead on this because this is not something that happened last year, two years, three years ago. This is something that’s been going on for over ten years, and our residents can’t take this anymore, and we need the relief right now.

In Miami-Dade County, we passed a legislation last year, not last year, a couple years back, when you were their commissioner. What we were doing was trying to help our residents with bringing them some relief. We created a fund to help our residents tap into these funds for the higher assessments because of all the laws that happened in Tallahassee, all that funds dried up.

Now we need Tallahassee to step in. We need our legislature, our house, and the Senate to work together to ensure that we have a product that really could help the residents of this community. So I thank you, Governor.

And if I may, we’re here today with the Governor, and we’re talking about the condominium reforms. And I want to thank the Governor and Mayor Diaz, who worked together on this legislation when he was in the commission with us. We understand the importance of having these reforms.

We understand the reforms that were passed and were made for the safety of these buildings. But when these reforms were passed, they didn’t realize that these funds, these reforms were going to put an extraordinary pressure on the residents of these condominiums. And these residents, the only thing they have are these units.

These are the units that created their families, the older people who are living there, who thought they were going to have a house for the rest of their lives. They’re realizing that they’re losing it. The county commission created a fund to help those people who had problems with these assessments.

But that fund is over. There’s no more money for the county. Now, the legislature is working.

The Senate has a bill that can help. It extends the time to have those funds available in the associations, and also gives flexibility to those associations to look for them in different ways, how they can increase those funds and have that money in the fund. That’s why it’s extremely important that this community says, basta ya, es el tiempo de ayudar a nuestros propietarios y ayudarnos con la comunidad.

Muchas gracias, Gobernador, por su ayuda. Good morning, and I thank you, Governor DeSantis, for being here in Miami today to talk about this condo crisis and how it’s impacting our residents. My name is Kevin Cortina, I’m a condo owner in Hialeah, and I serve as a condo association president.

And you know the issues that our owners are dealing with. We met last year at a round table, I think it was in September. And we talked about these issues, and you called for a special session.

And we talked about it, and you were adamant that this was going to happen. It was good faith, started in good faith, but this was going to happen. And unfortunately, they didn’t listen.

The current regulation requires condo associations to fully fund their reserves. This is something that hadn’t been in place for 50 years, and then all of a sudden, you gotta do it in one. This is imposing serious and sudden costs to all the condo owners.

Some of them, or many of them, which are, like was mentioned earlier, senior citizens or people on fixed incomes. What we’re seeing is that there’s a gap between what’s truly necessary to keep our building safe in the short term. And what’s driving the assessments high enough that it’s going to force people out of their homes.

There’s a new bill sponsored by Representative Vicky Lopez that’s going through the Florida House right now, the House of Representatives. And it’s concerning, it’s a concerning bill because it weakens the transparency, it makes it easier for fraud to occur. It gives condo boards or bad condo board members unchecked power without unit owner approval.

And it also makes it harder and more expensive to remove the bad condo board members. This is definitely not the right direction. The legislation does not favor residents, but instead, it favors the special interests.

Retired seniors are on a fixed income. They make a significant portion of our owners in Florida, and they are particularly vulnerable. Like the governor said, yeah, they can sell the property, but then where are they going to go? They’re being impacted with these high assessment costs, and they’re being forced to unfortunately sell, because they have no other choice.

These are my neighbors, they live with me. I hear this every single day, I live with them, and they’re just not able to do it. They’re not able to handle this pressing issue, something that was just put upon them so quickly.

The governor’s right, and we need relief right now. So we hope that our leaders in Florida are listening, and they can pass this legislation, that it will actually help the residents that elected them. Thank you.

Good morning, my name is Elizabeth. Thank you for having me. I’m just talking about my situation and everybody’s situation as well.

I moved in 2009, I bought the apartment, and I start paying 150 as a HOA. Right now I’m paying 532 as a single mom, it’s impossible for me to have that situation. And they try to put a special assessment as well, which is impossible.

We are normal people, working people, and just to remove the trees and to put new trees. How are you going to remove the trees that are perfectly fine, just to charge me like $1,000 extra to do that, and it’s impossible. I’m just talking in reference all the community, and I live in Hialeah, and it’s hard, that’s the only thing that I can say right now, as a resident.

I need a relief, yes, right now. So look, we’ve got an opportunity to do the condo reform now, that’s what we need. Thank you guys, you guys made signs, that’s great.

It’s the right thing to do. We don’t wanna have our residents that are buckling under these assessments, throws their entire lives into turmoil. There are things that happen that you can kind of cope with in life, but when you talk about the roof over your head possibly being in jeopardy, that is something that we should not be wanting to see happen, especially if we have the ability to do something about it.

So we wanna see really good legislation. I commend Senator Ileana Garcia, many members of the Florida Senate, and many rank and file members of the Florida House. There’s a lot of House members from South Florida I know that have been very attentive to this issue and also wanna see action.

But so far what the House is doing, I think as was mentioned, they’re not viewing this as an urgent problem, and then the bill they have is probably gonna make it worse. It’s probably gonna lead to more people being driven out of their home. It will be a ripe opportunity for developers to step in, but that shouldn’t be what we’re doing.

We should be passing legislation that’s gonna make it harder for our residents, particularly working class residents, to hold on to their units and then pave the way for developers to make more money. Developers made a lot of money in Florida over the last six years, I can tell you that. I mean, you drive around, there’s cranes everywhere.

Everyone wants to be in Florida, and people have made a lot of money on that. At what point are we gonna say, no, we gotta stand up for our rank and file Floridians, the people that are either working class or that are retired on fixed income, and we gotta do right by them. So I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do that, but we need to get this done, and we need to get it done now, okay? Okay.

Anybody have any questions? Hi. So I was at Surfside for two weeks straight, okay? It was a gut-wrenching experience. If there’s legislation that could have prevented that, I think everyone would have wanted to see it.

But you look at these assessments, these assessments are not based on the building’s gonna fall down. These are assessments that are cascading that just simply can’t be met, and if they are met, could be met over a more reasonable period of time. As they said, you had 50 years where this wasn’t something.

Now they’re saying in a very short window, you’ve gotta do all these assessments. And so there is transparency, and in the Senate bill, there’s even more transparency. People, the unit owners, need to know what deficiencies are in their building, and they need to have the tools they need to be able to take action.

But to artificially force these massive assessments, especially on things that are quite frankly more tangential to the core Surfside issue, it puts these people in an awful predicament. So give them flexibility. We had a framework that was in place.

I think that there was some, it was well intentioned. But it’s run aground, I think, in some of these instances, especially when you look at some of these units out here. So don’t force anyone out of their units.

Make sure that they have the flexibility they need, and don’t have a ham-handed approach to it. Understand that there’s a lot of different things that are being brought down on assessments, and I’d say, I’d be willing to bet, what they’re talking about, how does no relation to Surfside some of the things that are coming down at all? And so why would we wanna be forcing people artificially in those circumstances? And here’s the thing, if you had had transparency, and you go to unit owners and say, man, there’s some real structural problems with this building. It’s not safe, they’re all gonna want to rectify that.

I mean, I think part of the issue at Surfside is a lot of people didn’t know that there may have been some problems. And I think the legislation has helped clarify that. I think Ileana’s is even more for transparency.

And that information, I think, is really the most important thing. But that’s different than saying, fork over $100,000 to do improvements that really are not related to the core issue of Surfside. Go ahead.

Yep. Sure. I would support sales tax relief for Floridians.

I don’t wanna see us give relief to Canadians. I want them paying the tax, right? And so the issue is, is we need to do property tax relief for Floridians. That’s our residents, those are our people.

We’re in a great situation. We had 142 million visitors last year. When I was governor, the average tourism was stuck between 80 and 90 million a year.

When I became governor, they said, maybe we can get better than that. And we’ve shattered our record. So 142 million people, if they come and spend money, I have no problem with that, right, for them to pay the tax.

What I wanna do is cut taxes for Floridians and our residents. And the best way to target that is to do property tax relief for Florida residents. We can do a down payment this year.

We’ve calculated you’d get $1,000 for every homestead property in Florida. And some of this money does go to state, and not most property tax goes local. But there’s a required local effort that they do for education.

We can take care of that. We can give you guys the relief, and then get something on the ballot next year to be able to get that done. I’ll tell you what, the House’s proposal, I’ve never seen a tax cut that’s been proposed that has had more negative feedback from people.

Because they’re saying, why are you giving breaks to non-Floridians? Why are you doing this? And also to wealthy, to be honest with you, a wealthy buys a yacht, they’re gonna save a bunch of money on that. You go to the supermarket, most of which isn’t even taxed. And so people are looking to see what they would save, and they save very little.

It’s honestly, it’s like crumbs for most working class people. So if you’re gonna do sales tax, I think I agree with the President of the Senate, all Britain. If you’re gonna do sales tax, target it to things that are gonna benefit Floridians.

And we’ve done a good job of that in the past. We’ve done back to school holidays. We did the permanent exclusion for baby items.

And so no baby items are taxed in Florida. Now you go diapers, all that stuff is tax free. We do disaster preparedness.

I proposed the Second Amendment summer, so that people are able to buy the accoutrements and ammunition. Because we have a lot of people that do that in Florida. We also proposed a marine fuel tax holiday this summer.

So our boaters were able to go up and do. So those are things that are really gonna impact Floridians. But I don’t know why you would wanna relieve the burden on Brazilians come to Disney and stay for and spend all this money.

I want the government funded by our non-residents as much as possible. I wanna relieve burdens on Floridians and get the burdens to them. Back there.

First of all, Hope Florida is a state program. It did not get anything. There’s no funding involved with Hope Florida.

This is, it wasn’t my idea, wasn’t the legislature idea. This was the ingenuity of my wife or first lady who repurposed, first the child welfare system, but now other agencies. To where these bureaucrats, instead of just trying to get people on government programs, their job is to now be a hope navigator where they can get people all the support in the community that’s out there.

So we’ve enlisted churches, synagogues, charities, businesses, individuals as part of our Hope portal, a care portal. People go in, and then that program has been able to get 30,000 Floridians off of welfare on a road to self-sufficiency, and it has saved taxpayers $100 million. That’s a huge success.

And so I hear these things from liberal legislators, and honestly, a lot of these Republicans, quite frankly, are liberal legislators. They’re in media that have an agenda, and they’re trying to conflate a nonprofit that’s associated with the Department of Children and Families with the Hope Florida mission and program. Those are separate things.

Now, Hope Florida, people like the program so much, they have contributed to this direct support organization. And Hope Florida stakeholders have gotten a lot of money in grants, and it’s been very effective. But the ACCA settlement is something that is totally separate from Hope Florida.

But the ACCA settlement was 100% appropriate. They negotiated a very good deal, and it served the state very, very well. So I stand by what ACCA did 100% and understand what’s going on.

This is a political agenda. These are people who never had anything negative to say about any of the stuff with Hope Florida, and so they’re basically grasping at straws to try to do something to try to reflect negatively on it. It has nothing to do with Hope Florida, but the reality is this is a political agenda, and you do have Republicans.

These Republicans in the leadership office, they’re working hat in hand with the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times, very liberal media outlets. Is that what Republicans do, work with the Miami Herald? Are you kidding me? But that’s what they’re doing, and they think that somehow you’re gonna believe this drivel. So don’t fall for the political nonsense.

Understand that when you have a successful program like Hope Florida, that all these states now have sent emissaries to Florida to try to learn, and then they wanna do it in other states. And you’re seeing that done in states around the country, mostly Republican states cuz the liberal states don’t wanna work with churches, which I think is a big mistake. And I think our churches have been incredible resources to help people get up on their feet and get on a pathway to self-sufficiency.

But when you have $100 million saved of taxpayer money, when you have 30,000 people that have gotten off welfare programs just in a year and a half, two years, that is a huge, huge success. And just the way our world works, when there’s successes like that, that represents a threat to certain people, and some people don’t like it. So they try to kick up a dust storm and try to do it, but it’s basically much ado about nothing.

And this is a program that not only has been incredibly successful, but it’s something that really needs to be expanded, not just to other states, but even to other agencies in the state of Florida. It’s not, first of all, this was a settlement, a totally appropriate, it was a good deal that was negotiated, when you do settlements, you can try to get as much money as you can. But this was in addition to what they were getting.

This is kind of like a cherry on top, where they agreed to make an additional contribution. And so we were served well by what ACCA did. There was a potential you could have filed a lawsuit.

But I can tell you, if you look at it, it was not a clear cut case that we were guaranteed to win, and certainly not guaranteed to win that much money. So it was a good settlement. That money is going to serve the ACCA population.

Again, it’s nothing to do with Hope, Florida. It’s serving the ACCA population and will serve them well. And it was entirely appropriate and the right thing to do.

Yes? Secretary, she has a question for you. I have a lot of friends who are trying to get to remove the board members. Because they’re not listening to them, they’re sending emails about doing property stuff like doing church ramps, rentals, and the unit was three days, two days like a hotel.

They called the DDPR and said, no, that’s not what we do, I’m sorry, there’s no election. Why can’t you tell me so we can tell the residents? We have 125,000 homeless units. How the governor and you as the office is taking all of these complaints.

Actually, I’m going to make sure that all these laws that we have actually get implemented, because a piece of paper holds everything. But how you as the governor are going to make sure that the residents, a single person, a single mother, actually being taken care of when they are complaining to the state, and actually the state is going to take on that. Thank you.

You want to come up here and answer? Absolutely. So good news on that front is we talked about the legislation that’s been passed over the past three years, and with the most recent legislation, House Bill 1021, that was passed last year in conjunction with our Senate leaders. There was a provision there that gave us at the department expanded jurisdiction.

And what we really needed was additional tools in our toolbox. And so with that, what I’m happy to report is that we received more than 50% more complaints this year, but we have been able to close more than 60% less. So last year, when we had less tools to work with, we had to close a majority of our complaints because we didn’t have the authority granted to us by the legislature that we need to help citizens.

This year, we’ve only had to close about 11% of the complaints, and almost 90% of our cases that we’ve received, we have been able to help citizens. And in those small, very small number that we haven’t been able to, it’s because it was something that we didn’t have complete evidence. Maybe the person didn’t give their contact details.

It was incomplete in terms of what we were receiving. But there’s been tremendous growth result of this legislation, and that’s what we’re looking to expand upon with the Senate, in terms of this next piece of legislation that’s been contemplated and talked about today. But can you give your contact information to her? Please, we’d be happy to help.

We’ll follow up with you after this, so. Yes? Governor, thank you for everything you’re doing for our state. Sure.

Thank you for bringing the job back to the state. Thank you very much. I currently live in a property that’s been affected by mismanagement.

Documents being thrown away in the garbage, polluting together, violating Sunshine Law. I mean, it’s a whole slew of corruption and mismanagement. I’ve used every resource that I have to be honest with you.

I haven’t only filed one complaint. I’ve actually filed probably like ten complaints. There’s probably like 30 to 40 owners in my community that have fallen into that situation that we have.

We’ve faced increases in assessments. We’ve faced unlicensed contractors being hired, presidents of our association circumventing workers’ compensation, hiring individuals under 1099 as employees doing maintenance work. I mean, it’s the level of what’s going on in the community that I live in, it’s completely disgusting.

How can DDPR have the team to go out, investigate these cases, take these people to justice, arrest these individuals for their misbehavior? Because it’s obvious that we have a problem, and I completely applaud it. I was yesterday in Tallahassee speaking in front of Representative Bickey and all the people that are there. But any change for us as Utah Dominion owners, I applaud it, because the system is broken.

It’s obvious that it’s broken, and it’s obvious that it has to be fixed. And I’m very, very happy with the work that we’re doing. Because it’s exactly what we need.

So, one, I hear you. I do think the Senate proposal will help, but we’re going to also have the Secretary follow up with you today. Look, if there’s evidence, then we need to go.

You need to have enforcement. We can put this stuff on the books, but there’s got to be appropriate enforcement. Sometimes things go wrong, and then proving it is another thing, and obviously you’ve got to have the proof.

But if there’s proof there, you need to hold people accountable. Yes, sir. In which community is this? We actually had elections last year, finally.

We are in a good standing in comparison to a lot of these other communities. I think the message that we have is, first of all, to have more teeth in the DDPR. One of the things that we actually did was call a complaint to the DDPR to help us get elections.

What did we get? We got a bill from the DDPR, finally. Because, as a reward, we were able to push out the corruption, but now we’re paying for the DDPR not doing what it was supposed to be doing. We got a lot of complaints that were going in.

We were told by the DDPR, file a complaint, file as much as you can. There’s a lot of misinformation about the prospect, because there are no teeth. Now, when we as owners want to be able to see a change, now we understand exactly what needs to be changed.

I just have two suggestions, though. The first one is, is it possible to have a mandate where the board, if they don’t have an election every year, as mandated by the government, they automatically resign. Okay? Is that good? You guys would like that? Number one.

Number two is to have a statute of limitations no longer valid, as far as fraud. We’ve had a corrupt board for 15 years, three board members came in for 10 plus years, with their system, with their people, enough is enough. So what we’re trying to find out right now, what is going on, what happened, statute of limitations, if we find something, normally it’s already passed five years.

So that’s not what you look forward to as a homeowner. We’ve been here for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and we just found out. We should be able to go back and be able to go back, to these people, to this person.

Great. Now look, I think those are all great suggestions. We will pass those along to the legislature and the senators.

I will say this. The politics of South Florida Homeowners Association puts politics in Tallahassee or even Washington to shame. I mean, man, you guys got a lot to deal with.

But what I want to do, I want to have the secretary follow up with you, follow up with you, and follow up with you guys. So can you make sure you get your information to our folks? Can you get that, Grace, and then get it? And then you’ll get a follow-up today. And if there’s a basis to do more, we will.

And if there’s not, and you need more teeth, then that will certainly be something that we recommend to the Florida legislature. Okay, guys, we’re not going to take no. We’ll see you.