Williams & Strohm urges you NOW to contact your Ohio House Representative, bill sponsor, Rep. Cheryl Grossman, 77 S. High Street, 14th Floor, Columbus, Ohio 43215 and Richard Adams, Chair of the Financial Institutions, Housing, and Urban Development Committee, 77 S. High Street, 13th Floor, Columbus, Ohio 43215, and express your strong opposition to pending House Bill 371. You can Email these representative by going to Ohiohouse.gov, finding their profiles, and sending email. You can paste any of the below points into an email to them.

Please note that the opponent hearing on the Bill is scheduled for Wednesday, February 12, 2014. Your response before then would be much appreciated.

Below are the major points of the bill and the reasons for opposition. As you can see the bill would impose criminal penalties on volunteer board members, require your property manager to be a licensed real estate agent or broker, and mire condominium disputes in costly and unnecessary state sponsored dispute resolution. Yearly fees would be assessed to each association to support this bureaucracy. This is an unprecedented tax on homeowners living in condominiums. It does not apply to homeowner associations.

1. The bill requires open board meetings, with no parameters for participation or standards of behavior by attendees, coupled with imposing criminal penalties for failure to follow the requirements of the condominium law. With these types of requirements and the possibility of criminal penalties, it will be very difficult to recruit the volunteers necessary to serve on the boards; without these board members, the association governance will collapse.
2. The bill requires management companies and/or individual managers to obtain a real estate broker's or salesperson license and will result in higher fees on the associations. Additionally, it will put a number of existing management companies, many of whom are recognized leaders of the industry, out of business. The division of real estate is not equipped to educate or oversee these community association managers and is not equipped to serve as a dispute resolution commission. The bill imposes an annual $3 per unit fee which will result in a tax burden for associations and is likely insufficient to fund the dispute resolution services required by the division. The dispute resolution commission will only delay resolutions due to the time involved and the requirement for those with disputes to travel to Columbus to be heard.
3. The bill establishes a commission of 7 volunteers appointed for 5-year terms to hear and investigate all disputes, contested elections, and complaints about access to records. Again, there are literally thousands of condominium associations across the state and, like in any community, conflict exists. Furthermore, to create such a commission without any representation from the community manager professionals is counterintuitive, especially since, by this same bill, they are required to be professionally licensed.