Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that he expects the Legislature to fix new condo safety laws that led to spiking fees and assessments before the end of the year, despite some Legislative leaders expressing no interest in reconvening before the regular session in March.
"We're going to continue to solicit and get feedback, and we will be working with the Legislature," DeSantis said at a Pinellas roundtable event Thursday morning. He pointed out that the "November, December time period" would be the most convenient time for a special session because most Lawmakers will already be in Tallahassee for the upcoming committee weeks.
"This will be something that I'm making clear now: it's not going to be able to be pushed off," he continued, promising "We're not gonna punt this till next year," and insisting that most of the legislators he's spoken to "want to do something by the end of the year."
The issue?
Senate President Kathleen Passidomo in August sent out a letter rejecting calls for a special session, slamming the "misconceptions and inaccuracies" over the three condo safety laws passed between 2022 and 2023. Incoming Senate President Ben Albritton and House Speaker Danny Perez have similarly expressed low interest in a special session, the Miami Herald reported, cautioning against rushing into reforming laws without examining all avenues.
After Surfside's Champlain Towers condo suddenly crumpled in on itself in June 2021, killing 98 people and turning the area to rubble, the Legislature quickly passed a slew of legislation requiring condominium associations to put into place various security protocols. This includes a Jan. 1, 2025, deadline for engineers to inspect the buildings and provide an estimate of how much repairs will cost.
However, the burden of funding those repairs has fallen on condo owners, whose monthly fees and insurance costs have skyrocketed and forced some out of their homes, according to 72-year-old Clearwater condo owner Ronni Drimmer.
"[These are] the largest assessments I've had, and I've lived here for 21 years," Drimmer, one of the panelists, told DeSantis. She blasted the laws, telling the Governor that "there's nothing there" to help out struggling residents. "I'd like to see that we could have access as associations...to finance some of these projects at a no-interest loan that's stretched out. It's a matter of stretching out the timeline here."
DeSantis acknowledged her concerns, saying that the Legislature needs to "line up the reforms" to ensure a successful special session. He also partially pinned the blame for the costly laws on the agency investigating why the Champlain Towers collapsed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who won't have a report ready until 2026.
"More than three years after the Surfside tower collapsed we still don't have a final report from the federal agency that's in charge of identifying these building collapses and explaining the cause," he said. "In fact, we don't anticipate the final report until 2026—we won World War Two in less time than it's going to take them to do this report!"
"It's just a reminder that when the Legislature took up some of the condo issues, they were doing it without really having a definitive explanation of what happened at Champlain Towers," DeSantis added.
The Florida Governor's shots across the bow at a federal agency's opaque investigation are nothing new. Earlier this week, he announced that the state of Florida will conduct its own parallel probe into an alleged failed assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump to ensure a "transparency" and "forthrightness" he claims is not present in federal investigations.
