See if this analogy works for you. An apartment renter completes the term of a lease, leaves on the appointed date and then is billed for two extra months because the landlord says there was no proper notice. This situation, according to Jodi Chase, a Tallahassee lobbyist who is paid to get things done for the Florida Apartment Association, is analogous to not showing up for a party.
"The whole point of this is the landlord has to know if the person is staying or going," says Chase. "It's like trying to get an RSVP to your kid's birthday party."
Sure, except that your neighbor isn't likely to fine you $2,000 if your kid doesn't show up.
This is the heavy hand of Florida landlords again, business people who can count on state legislators to provide the muscle. Equity Residential and Gables Residential Trust, two of the state's largest apartment owners, are facing a class action suit for precisely this type of leasing practice. Attorneys for the tenants argue their clients have been bilked for $23-million in penalties. But as that lawsuit plays out, the landlords thought of their good friends in the state Capitol.
So, last year, as lawmakers debated a bill aimed at protecting military families in apartments who are uprooted by war, three sentences were added in one committee. The senators who proposed the amendment called it "clarification of requirements that affect both tenants and landlords."
Some "clarification." It inserted into state law a 60-day notice provision that is the subject of court challenge.
Two Democratic lawmakers, Sen. David Aronberg and Rep. Mary Brandenburg, now say they were duped last year by the bill and are trying this year to at least provide some warning for consumers. Their confessions invite reasonable questions of their colleagues, none of whom opposed last year's legislation. Did they, too, vote in ignorance, or did they know full well they were sticking it to apartment dwellers? Which is it?
The change that Aronberg and Brandenburg are offering is modest. They say that, at the very least, landlords should be required to give tenants 15 days' notice in advance of the 60 days' notice that tenants are now supposed to provide to landlords prior to their departure. But maybe they're not being sneaky enough, because their bill hasn't made it to the floor of either chamber yet.
What's stopping them? Wouldn't this simply be like warning your neighbors you're going to ransack their house if they don't answer the RSVP to your kid's birthday party? Surely Jodi Chase can see the logic in that.
