The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

Some good legislation just passed in Florida and was signed into law, almost unanimously passing House, Senate and Governor's desk, limiting HOA restrictions, including not letting them to disallow the parking of your truck or commercial vehicle.

Suck it, HOAs!

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/1203

Many HOAs are worthless and just an excuse for small minded people to have authority. I received quite a lot of notices of being out of compliance with the County's codes and they were threatening fines. They even sent registered mail at times.  Seeing as how I actually enforced the Land Development Code for the county I knew they were full of crap. Instead of giving them a "do you know who I am" speech,  I asked them for the code I was not following so that I could make sure to meet it. I never heard from them again. Commonly they are bullies who just go unchecked.

FALSE

The bill also provides that homeowners’ associations may not prohibit a homeowner or others from parking:

A personal vehicle, including a pickup truck, in the property owner’s driveway or in any other area where they have a right to park.
A work vehicle, which is not a commercial motor vehicle, in the property owner’s driveway.
Their assigned first responder vehicle on public roads or rights-of-way within the homeowners’ association.

The article specifically says the HOA is prohibited from disallowing parking of vehicles which is not a commercial motor vehicle.  Triple negative there, but commercial vehicles are still able to be disallowed.  However, it does not seem to offer any definition of what is considered a "commercial motor vehicle."

The fact that many communities still disallowed pickup trucks is antiquated and stupid.  I'm glad this took care of that.

Commercial vehicles are spelled out under Florida law as they require a CDL.

Florida Statute regarding driver's licenses defines a commercial vehicle as “any motor vehicle or motor vehicle combination used on the streets or highways, which: (a) Has a gross vehicle weight rating of 26,001 pounds or more; (b) Is designed to transport more than 15 persons, including the driver; (c)Is transporting hazardous materials and is required to be placarded in accordance with 49 CFR 172, (F)”

An F-350 with signage is not a commercial truck under Florida law as it is less than 10,000 pounds. If it fits in your driveway you are good to go.

I feel HOAs should be able to have most anything in the original formation agreement but have extreme limitations on what can be modified. 

If everyone buying into the original HOA agrees that you can't have a truck, that garbage pails must be pink with purple poka dots and Halloween decorations must be taken down by sundown on Nov 1.  Then fine.  If you don't like those regulations then don't buy a house there.  But if the original documents allowed for pickup trucks than it shouldn't be the case that pickups can be prohibited later on unless there is unanimous agreement. 

I can only speak for Florida, but to change the governing docs of an HOA typically requires 3/4 approval (I think, maybe 2/3) of the membership.  Meaning the board cannot willy-nilly change the governing docs without a large scale effort to obtain approvals from 75% of the people in the community.  Getting that many people to do ANYTHING en masse is nearly impossible.  However, the board can impose guidelines and restrictions that are not specifically enumerated in the docs.

I don't subscribe to the libertarian-ish idea that any contract is fine as long as you "willingly" sign it.  These sorts of HOAs can be abused to socially engineer a certain kind of neighborhood.  Government regulation is useful for precisely these kinds of legal-but-obnoxious leverages of power.

HOAs for condo complexes, which have large amounts of shared space and maintenance, make sense.  But for developments of single-family homes, they seem more of an abuse of a legal vacuum than anything else.

I don't have a problem with pickups being banned if it was original governing documents. But I don't feel the board should be allowed to impose restrictions that isn't in the governing documents.

I do.

Full stop.

I was using "work vehicle" and "commercial vehicle" interchangeably.  That was my bad.

You can park your work truck, but not a dump truck.

So your good with telling many of the blue collared workers they can never live in a gated community because I've never seen an HOA that didn't include that. Fortunately many don't enforce it on pick-ups and for them that do same color magnets to cover the logo has worked well. 

I am good with people making there own choices.  I see it a lot like hotels/apartments pet policies.  Some allow pets some don't.  I prefer a pet free hotel/apartments.  But I don't think all places should be that way, but I would have a problem with a place switching either forcing someone to give up a pet or someone who doesn't like dogs now needing to deal with them. If there is a market for pickup friendly HOAs, then there will be pickup friendly HOAs.

This is a hot-button issue where I live.  People have a car with a vehicle wrap and some people in the community want to call it a commercial vehicle and ban it.  Similarly, Joe the Plumber works for Joe's Plumbing and drives a van that says Joe's Plumbing on the side.  Commercial vehicle?  My community board says it is not.  But some people who live there think that van should not be allowed in the community.

This law is an overreach of that problem.  What is allowed and not allowed should be clearly and unambiguously before the first house is sold.

it is, it was, and it always will be.  The docs say "no commercial vehicles" - the docs make no mention of defining what is a commercial vehicle.  however as CF pointed above, the definition is provided in Florida statute.

The issue is people think anything that has writing on it is "commercial" and that's simply untrue.

I don't live in a HOA community but aren't the board members home owners? Who writes it up if no one lives there? The builder? I definitely want representatives when the document is written.

I think HOAs are essentially just a scam to help attorneys.  They set it up, they charge big fees to fight the people in the community, so no matter what happens, the people who live there get screwed.

It might have the best intentions to start, but HOAs are the worst.  You can't beat them because it's not a fair fight -- they have nothing to lose, because they're just funded by you anyway.  If you lose, you can lose your home.  It's bullshit and they're basically impossible to dissolve, plus the attorneys that back them have too much power and would never let it happen.

The Developer writes up the original covenants and files them with the governing authority. Once the neighborhood reaches a certain level of occupancy, like 20-30 percent, the Board is handed over to them. It was rare but ’ve inspected some neighborhoods before releasing their 2 year Maintenance Bonds and the Developer still is running the board because they hadn’t sold enough yet.

The only good thing if anything is ambiguous or confusing to the homeowner the courts always side with the resident

Yeah, but so what?  Side with the resident and then the HOA (which is just the residents anyway) have to end up paying the attorney fees for both sides in the loss.

I wonder how many people that are for HOAs are against mandatory Union dues when they go work at a union shop with a negotiated contract. And how many people that are for mandatory union dues are against HOAs.

I didn't say it was great. I was saying the only good thing is that. Having to pay attorney fees sucks unless you are an attorney living there. As previously mentioned at 2 years we would do an inspection on the infrastructure prior to releasing the Developer's bond. We had this happen in a smaller, nice, higher end neighborhood. The biggest issue being the developer refused to fix the items on the punch list and some were quite expensive. That's when some of the residents there who were attorneys sued his butt off, got his bond revoked, and took over the HOA.

My experience is most people don't care for the job (HOA) and those that do are only in it for a power trip. That's why they many times suck. Few are in it for the betterment of the neighborhood. 

I had some residents trying to get me to run for the HOA.  I would rather eat tacks.

I AM ON THE BOARD OF MY HOA.

I joined the board when i moved into this community becasue, at the time, there were a ton of stories about misappropriation of funds and embezzling that made me want to make sure MY money wasn't getting spent improperly.

That was 18 years ago.  I was supposed to be replaced max term of 3 years, but no one wants to take my place.  If I leave, the board will be below critical mass, and the state takes over.  Dave has told me many times "just kick rocks and tell them to shove it."

If the state takes over, its sky-high monthly dues, its chaos and hands-off management and plummetting property values.  I am NOT in it for the power trip.  At this point, I'm in it to protect my own property.

The neighbors in the community want nothing to do with serving on the board, but everything to do with complaining about it.  Everyone has comments to make until you offer them an opportunity to take ownership and make change, and then they just say "nevermind, yall are doing a great job."

The intent of a HOA is so that the people who live there take an interest in preserving the quality of their neighborhood.  Unfortunately, some people just want to be fake governors - they give HOA's a bad name.  We have never had a special assesment.  We have kept the dues increases to a minimum. We pretty much let people do what they want to do.  For the most part, the other board members and I do not hassle anyone, and do not want to be hassled ourselves.

Does your HOA have a truck clause? @Bfein

I'm not sure what this means. Can you explain? I worked for Seminole County for 13 years. In that time we took over about 4 HOA neighborhoods and made them public because they couldn't function as was originally intended. It's my understanding only a small fee was charged in their taxes to pay for common maintenance.  

This is one neighborhood not far from Phish called Bella Tuscany. it was turned over at least 10 years ago if not more and as you can see from Zillow the neighborhood has held its value when compared to surrounding neighborhoods.

https://shorturl.at/kH0fK

If that doesn't work try searching this in Zillow ... 1339 Bella Tuscany Cv, Longwood, FL 32750

No, we do not.

I don't know details since i have no experience with this but it was conveyed to me that if there is no board of directors, the state takes ownership of the HOA.  And as the state has about 10 million better things to do that run my community, they issue conservative budgets and just essentially act as a bookkeeper, they pay the bills, they collect the money and that's it.  This is what I've been told by a prior property management company which ran our community at the time.