Lessons From Florida How California’s legislature could address the systemic problems that surfaced from the Surfside tragedy.
6 The Law Journal Winter 2021 | cacm.org
Over time, engineers and fact-finders will teach us the specific causes of the failure(s) and find responsible parties for the sudden and unexpected collapse of the 40-year-old Champlain Tower structure. Until then and with admitted self-assured hubris, I offer my thoughts on what occurred, who is responsible, and how California’s legislature could constructively address this horrific tragedy. The Towers represented so much. At once, they were people’s homes, dreams, their respite, their life savings, their worldly achievement, retirement account, place at the beach, escape from the heat, and as of now, the last breath for 98 souls. As an industry and as humans, we need to slow our blame on individuals and instead focus attention on mitigating some obvious systemic problems – the invisible elephants which march through our industry like unlit rail cars moving through the night.
repairs. While nobody saw the sudden and unexpected collapse of a 40-year-old concrete building coming, most members knew there were significant and expensive structural challenges ahead. With no prescient dictator to demand immediate repair, members (logically) assumed there was space to disagree with methods, costs, and processes of repair. In that space and time, the board was nothing more or less than a microcosm of the membership which elected it – a conflicted group of folks doing their best to quantify overwhelming operating and maintenance costs in the face of limited finances.
FIRST, LEAVE THE BOARD ALONE
So as an industry, we need to pause and accept that the most palpably amazingly cool aspect of our community associations – its self-governance – is also a likely culprit here. The very design of allowing owners to elect their representatives, regardless of professional experience and sometimes based on nothing more than a promise “not to raise assessments,” has real and continuing implications.
One failure at the Towers appears to have been an “us vs. them” mentality of owners vs. the volunteer directors trying to raise assessments to make
That doesn’t mean that the legislature should step in and change this design; it means that the legislature needs to acknowledge that such a
