Important Reminder: Simon was injured slightly on Friday, cleaning up shattered glass in the trash room. You can not dump your empty liquor bottles down the trash chutes without putting them into a trash bag! They shattered and left the liquor remnants in puddles on the floor. Simon was injured cleaning up after who ever did this. Be considerate with your trash!
Also:
Chapter 2 of the letter to Owners
The information we had in the office was that everyone had installed the same sliding balcony doors. We found out the hard way that this was not true. Many of you are aware of all the problems this bad information caused until we had brought in 2 door contractors and an engineer to figure that out with our contractor.
Our intention was to replace only the railings that needed replacement. That would have been OK, except, luckily, one of our owners tipped us off that some damaged railings were replaced with the least expensive product available and the pickets of the railings were too far apart. We found, upon a close inspection that 40% of our railings were either weather damaged or replaced with railings that did not meet current safety codes. Unfortunately, several years ago Pompano changed their building code so that if a building needs to replace more than 25% of their railings, they are required to replace them all! That cost us a fortune that we didn’t have in the budget because we were not planning on replacement.
Then the legal process of agreeing to change the color of the railings set our project back by 2 months.
We had originally planned to replace the surface of the pool deck. We did not expect to have to tear the pool apart first. We had no way of knowing that prior repairs stupidly put one layer of diamond bright finish over another…....7 times! Removal and all the needed repairs that were just covered over instead of being repaired now had to be done all at once.
While working on the pool and fixing all of the leaks, we found a void filled with water under the pool foundation under the ground floor parking area. We currently have a plumbing engineer, a structural engineer and a geological engineer arguing among themselves as to why it is there and what we need to do about it. We are still hounding them for a determination.
Many of the other items in the letter are self explanatory and were fully explained in many of my previous emails. Each one of these issues has required a ton of time and effort as well as a ton of money.
One of my favorites is when members of the Board are approached by an owner who tells us “You don’t understand what it is like!” Actually, we do. We are the ones dealing with it. There is nothing you have gone through that we have not. One former Board member, Bob Walsh, lived in his unit for about 8 months with a wooden wall in the living room. There was no other source of light in a 1 bed room unit. It was like living in a cave! I posted pictures of my wooden wall and, if you remember, instead of getting upset I turned it into an “art museum” with famous paintings including suggestions from many of you. We turned it into a diversion. Someone asked me what we did about the dust. I told them that we cleaned it after 4 PM when work ended for the day. I don’t know what they expected. And if Board members were treated special, how do you explain that stack 4 has not had use of their balconies for 14 months. Your President and Vice President live in stack 4. We aren’t enjoying it at all, but we don’t have a choice. This work MUST be done. Last week I asked one of our engineers what he thought would have happened if we had pushed off the concrete job by 5 years. His answer was that our balconies would have begun sagging and falling off. That is the situation we’re in. Not because of anything you or our Board members did over the past few years. This is the culmination of 50 years of wear and tear, a block from the beach, constant exposure to salt air and poor workmanship on many of the repairs that were done as well as the result of many repairs that were pushed off.
Please don’t mistake this as a list of complaints to you. It is not! But you need to know what is going on and understand that when a bulb is out, or a light switch needs to be replaced, it is lower on the priority list. Not to mention that thanks to the covid-19 situation we can’t get parts and supplies in a reasonable time period as we used to. We would just appreciate your patience in a very difficult time where your Board, Ali and our employees are working very hard in less than ideal conditions.
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