Aventura requires condo associations share all engineering reports with city

The city of Aventura passed an ordinance Tuesday that requires all community associations, including condo, co-op and homeowners associations, to share with the city any and all engineering, architectural and life-safety reports they conduct within 48 hours of receiving them.

The ordinance passed unanimously on second reading at a special commission meeting, making Aventura the first municipality in the state to institute such a requirement, according to the city. The measure previously passed on first reading at a July 22 commission meeting and will go into effect immediately.

At the same Tuesday meeting, commissioners also passed unanimously on first reading a sister ordinance that aims to issue the same requirement for commercial buildings’ engineering and life-safety reports. To become law, the commercial building ordinance will have to pass on second reading, which could happen as soon as Sept. 2.

Conceived in the wake of the Surfside condo collapse this summer that left 98 dead, the aim of the new city law, according to Mayor Enid Weisman, is to mandate transparency about building safety and empower residents to easily access all engineering reports that have been conducted about their homes.

When city officials receive the engineering reports from the condo associations, the ordinance requires that the city make them available to the public via a government-run website. The law does not mandate any additional inspections be conducted by the associations, but requires disclosure of the results of any inspections the associations opted to do on their own.

While investigations into the reason for the tragedy at Champlain Towers South in late June are ongoing, an engineer had informed the towers’ homeowners association of “major structural damage” due to a “major error” in the building’s design three years prior to the deadly collapse.

At Tuesday’s meeting, commissioners disagreed over a few details in the ordinance’s language, particularly about the grace period allotted to associations to turn over the reports to the city.

The ordinance mandates that presidents of the community associations — or the engineer or other figure to whom they have signed over responsibility, with the city manager’s approval — be held responsible for delays in sharing the documents.

Associations in violation of the new law face daily fines of up to $500 and homeowner association presidents or other responsible parties could receive up to 60 days in prison.

While the original text of the ordinance in July gave associations 24 hours to turn over the reports, the now-approved law allows for up to 48 hours.

“I think that anybody who works in any building understands that there are times when there is no humanly possible way we can get it there in 24 hours, because they may not have even opened their email,” said Aventura Vice Mayor Linda Marks, advocating for an extension to three days.

Commissioner Marc Narotsky opposed the extension, saying that, especially in light of availability of digital submissions, the 24-hour requirement would keep the submission of reports as “part of the task” for the engineer or homeowner association president handling them. It would also better serve the commission in “doing everything we can to protect the city,” Narotsky argued, “both on the moral front and the political front.”

The 48-hour window was ultimately viewed as a compromise, with only Narotsky and Weisman remaining in favor of the 24-hour timeline and voting against it.

Marks also raised a potential objection to the requirement in the ordinance that reports be submitted to both the city manager and the city’s chief building official. Weisman was in favor of preserving the requirement to submit to both, since “if there’s one lesson we should have learned it’s that without redundancy things fall through the cracks.”

“Aventura’s residents can rest assured that our city is a safer place today than it was yesterday,” Weisman said in a statement to the Miami Herald after the meeting. “By requiring the city be provided with these reports, we both ensure transparency and public safety.”

This story was originally published August 10, 2021 at 8:29 PM.