Deerfield-News.com-Deerfield Beach,Fl- The following is what was reported on CVEDB.com we are reporting under “Fair Use” All printed matter on the following story/subject is from CVEDB.com .
On Friday, May 1st, 2015, the trial of Ventnor-B (plaintiff) on behalf of COOCVE member associations and COOCVE (defendant) was concluded with a six person jury finding for the plaintiff and awarding an amount of $5 million dollars. That sounds nice but since this is really COOCVE suing COOCVE, where does the $5 million dollars won for COOCVE members come from? One place it can’t come from is COOCVE. Under no circumstances will we ask the COOCVE Member Associations to give us $5,000,000 to give to Ventnor B, who would then have to return this same money to these same COOCVE Member Associations. That would be totally ridiculous. As COOCVE has no funds, this verdict will bankrupt COOCVE and thwart its work in the Village of helping the member Associations and residents. COOCVE intends to appeal this decision.
This was one of the several actions brought by Ventnor B against COOCVE which involved a claim that COOCVE wrongfully transferred remaining Hurricane Wilma proceeds to the contractor and others in order to resolve all outstanding Hurricane Wilma claims. The arguments included the contract signed by then COOCVE President, Ira Grossman, at the end of 2005 with Group One within 2 days of the Hurricane and the handling of the Hurricane monies by COOCVE since it did not own the Association property but was listed as a co-payee on the checks from the insurance company and the payment of the deductible monies by the buildings received upfront.
Some of the actions taken may have technically violated some provisions of our documents, such as what was later learned that COOCVE did not have authority to obtain the group insurance of the buildings yet had been historically doing so. When you have a severe emergency, to protect life and property, not all the rules could be followed. Following the Hurricane in October of 2005 and the weeks that followed, when Wilma struck leaving many buildings with damaged roofs and units drenched with rain water, it was impossible to expect each Association to locate any roofing contractor to do the repairs to minimize further damage. COOCVE , with the approval of the COOCVE Executive Committee, and with no objection by the Associations, entered into an agreement with a single contractor to handle all Wilma damages in Century Village East. This contractor had contacts with roofers and other sub-contractors which resulted in a quick repair of every building with damage. Considering the enormous number of Wilma damaged buildings in South Florida all at the same time, there was a shortage of qualified contractors and material. A year after all the work in CVE was completed, we could still see the blue tarps on many buildings outside of our Village indicating that they were still waiting to have their roofs repaired. If an Association did not want to participate, it could have tried to hire its own contractor and handle its own repairs.
You may recall reading that in the Reporter in August 2007, our Controller at the time, Bill Morse, identified that Group One was claiming it was owed over $12 million dollars, and additional claims against us from the Florida Guaranty Fund and the State of Florida Receiver for Southern Family/Poe Insurance. Bill noted that there was only $ 7.8M in remaining funds from the insurance company in the Bank to pay all these claims.
In the lawsuit, Ventnor B sought return of these monies despite the fact that the evidence at trial showed that the money was used to make repairs and obtain releases of all claims particularly to Group One, the general contractor who had placed liens on the buildings and was threatening to take legal action. COOCVE did the prudent thing and hired an attorney to sort through and determine what was actually due and owing to the contactor and obtain a Release of that claim for COOCVE and the Associations that received the benefit of the work performed to repair the buildings. The buildings were all repaired and yet Ventnor B claimed the buildings were still entitled to surplus funds. As mentioned above there were no surplus funds. The claim of Group One was resolved without any additional assessments to the unit owners or buildings.
