Jan Bergemann

The tragedy of the Champlain Tower collapse in Florida has the rest of the country, and perhaps the world, scratching their heads wondering why an otherwise seemingly well-built building would all of a sudden just collapse in the middle of the night? What happened to cause the building to crumble, burying many of the owners and residents in the rubble? How do we prevent something like this from happening again if we don’t know what caused it? There are as many thoughts and ideas as to the cause but nothing concrete yet. Was it, as some people speculate, rusted-out metal rebars? Did the saltwater have anything to do with it? Could the concrete have been too thin? Was it the proper consistency? And the all-time favorite, the owners failed to have sufficient reserves? I suppose there are loads of reasons why the building could have fallen so dramatically, but that is not helping us prevent it from ever happening again. So barring a conclusive reason for the failure of the structure, we turn our attention to the things we need to improve on to catch any flaws during the construction phase of a building. This is where the local governments need to step in and stop whining.

Jan Bergemann joins us On the Commons.  Jan is the founder and president of the Florida-based Cyber Citizens for Justice. Jan is always generous with his time and in-depth knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes in Florida. Today is no exception. His insider knowledge helped explain a lot of mysteries. We still have no conclusive evidence, but the Federal government is sending money and the workforce to dig a little deeper into the tragedy. Finally, our tax dollars may be doing some good instead of being wasted. Here, we hope we get some solid answers and make sure there will never be a repeat performance.  

Listen to Jan Bergemann
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David Kahn

Over the years, there have been many of us involved with trying to understand why we have mandatory membership HOAs, whether or not they serve a purpose.  And we have spent many hours discussing where they serve a purpose.  Here is what we discovered: the sole purpose is for the municipal government to collect free tax dollars.  Check it out for yourself; You have an HOA that provides you with trash removal. Snow removal, if needed, street lighting, street repairs, and other minor tweaks as necessary.  So we all paid our assessments to the HOA, trash and snow have been removed, and street lighting has been provided. All of this was done by the HOA.  And then we got our bills for property taxes.  

Property taxes?  What on earth for?  In Virginia, those of us in Fairfax County got even more outrageous news. The county government discovered they had a huge surplus of funds. After giving it very serious consideration, the board decided they worked really hard and deserved a huge raise.  I cannot believe that abuse.  “They worked really hard!” What about all the mothers who worked full-time and part-time jobs to make enough money to feed their children? I would have greatly respected them had they decided not to tax their constituents, as they did not need additional funds.  Their avarice and greed have to stop.

I look forward to having David Kahn join us again to look at the many other ways we can trim the costs associated with HOAs and bring the insanity associated with the HOAs down to a minimum.  We do not deserve to be gouged needlessly.  Stay tuned, I look forward to these discussions.  I would love to hear from all of you; you can email me at [email protected]. I’ll share them with David and all of you on this website,

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