On Tuesday night at the City Commission meeting, City Attorney Glen J. Torcivia brought up the Tolling Agreement with REG Architects and Morganti regarding the Casino building. It was about to expire.
A Tolling Agreement allows a party(ies) additional time to correct the problems without the necessity of filing an action. There is a statute of limitations and our city attorney advised that we give the architect and contractor four additional months to correct the deficiencies at the Casino which waives the right to claim that litigation should be dismissed. If not corrected within that period, he will advise filing a law suit.
The Casino was officially opened on March 1, 2013 with a ribbon cutting although most tenants were occupying their spaces in the later part of 2012. Defects did not appear right away and there have been serious issues through the years with water not draining properly from the second level causing a lot of damage even ruining inventory of a store below. The water damage continues to this day. Door handles have corroded and there has been other hardware problems. These companies tell us that they are still working on correcting the defects...their reputations are at stake.
I can appreciate the Vice Mayor's frustration in allowing a Tolling Agreement to continue. The vote was 3/1 [Andy Amoroso was absent] to extend the tolling Agreement for four months or until October 5. Our patience has worn thin and a lot of time and money has been expended on this serious and never ending costly problem. As the mayor suggested, the companies need to make this their priority. We contracted in good faith and they need to live up to the contract.
After four months, no more Mr. Nice Guy.
3 comments:
Let's hope that they finally correct their shoddy work once and for all. This is ridiculous.
The Lucerne sued the builder,and after a number of years won the case. You can see by the extensive work they are doing on the building that the original structure must have been in a terrible state. Without the intervention of the legal system, that would never have happened. I don't know the particulars, but I doubt it is the original builder that is doing the restoration. I do know that they had a high-powered Miami law firm. Not some local shlub.
Don't know any details as to what is going on at The Lucerne. Perhaps it is general maintenance that was budgeted. We do our condo every 6 years...painting, caulking, etc.
One thing for sure, there should have been a law suit just allowing it to be built in the first place with waivers, etc. And then, they were supposed to give us public parking. They never did.
Also, we have some great law firms around here and our city attorney is very effective. The city just can't afford to get into lawsuits and if we end up with one, it would be years before we get anything done at our building. Give the architect and contractor the 4 months to finally solve it all.
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