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Article Courtesy of The Palm
Beach Post
By DIANNA SMITH
Published December 7, 2007
DELRAY BEACH — The newly elected board of
the Delray Racquet Club Condominium Association will spend the new year
fixing financial problems that date back to Hurricane Wilma.
The neighborhood, formerly known as the
Lavers Tennis Club, sits south of Linton Boulevard and suffered severe
roof damage from Hurricane Wilma in 2005. The following year residents of
the 460-unit development learned the association had to pay $1 million for
repairs. But then in the spring of 2007, board members informed residents
the assessment had increased and they needed to pay another $4.3 million.
The increase meant some property owners
paid as much as $19,000 in fees.
"Everybody got up in arms and said, ëWhat's
going on here?'" board president Michael Farenga said. "People
were disgusted. There were a lot of unanswered questions." Farenga
said that the five board members at the time apparently did not properly
assess the damage done to the development.
Residents demanded to see the association's
financial records, but when they requested the records, they were
difficult to get, residents said. "No one likes surprises, not like
what we got," said Frank Harrison, a new board member. "People
wanted to know how to justify this amount of money and that justification
wasn't coming forward." Frustrated residents took a recall vote in
late 2007 to replace the board and though there were enough votes to
dismiss the members, the board would not certify the recall. So residents
took another recall vote and the board again dismissed it, forcing
residents to send it to the state for arbitration.
In the meantime, the board suddenly
resigned and reappointed their own replacements, but those new board
members were only in power for a short while before they, too, resigned in
early December.
"They accepted the recall and stepped
down and they recognized us a new a board," Farenga said. Now the
board has seven members, instead of five, and only one member is from the
former board.
"I'm trying to repair (things) and it
looks like it's working," Farenga said. "We're starting to get
answers."
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