There is a very important vote coming up, a vote that took years to enforce: the vote and review of property management.
This vote almost happened without your knowledge and without your input because our elected board falsely thinks that they have absolute power and absolute financial freedom with our building’s money and our property aesthetic and value.
Many of you have had horrible experiences with Cervelli and are very unhappy with the building aesthetic. Did you know that our building spends $180,000 plus every year on basic services? Does our building look like it should for $180,000 plus every year?
What we pay for the service horror show at Waterside Condos:
Two full time maintenance and cleaning employees:
76,873.68 base salary for Jose and Julio
8,955.96 employer taxes for Jose and Julio
6,000 year end bonus plus an unknown amount of overtime pay likely in the thousands
= 91,829.64 plus living expenses of apartment, truck, gas, electric (for Jose) and their phones (Jose and Julio)
Standard vendor maintenance:
26,000 for pool maintenance based on 2014 record
31,200 for James Cervelli Management
38,000 for landscaping and snow removal based on 2014 record
187,029.64
Every owner has the right to request a review of the accounting books and ledger and receipts when they give 10 days notice for an appointment where the records are housed (at Cervelli’s offices). I have done this in 2015 and 2018, taking up at least eight hours of my personal time to review all expenditures, bills and spreadsheets.
Did you know that Jose, our super does not have to provide receipts for all his expenditures?
There are many issues with Cervelli and our current elected board does not keep record of all of our complaints about Cervelli and in the meeting on September 17, they attempted to take a vote to vote Cervelli into a new contract without informing us of the other options reviewed. I stopped the vote because they are required to send out an agenda for open meetings where votes on financial decisions will take place. In fact, Cervelli himself was waiting in the lobby with pizzas to celebrate, meaning, they had already decided behind closed doors to keep Cervelli and where just holding a vote for show because I worked with NJ State in Trenton to enforce two year reviews and votes on all vendor contracts.
During the September 17th meeting, the board said all the other management companies reviewed were horrible. I asked what lead them to believe they were horrible? They said the spoke to board members of the other buildings these companies manage. When I probed further, they were not able to say exactly who they spoke to and what the specific complaints were. Meaning, our board is full of bullstuff.
The two best management companies are Aurther Edwards and Taylor Management. Aurther Edwards currently manages the beautifully kept and financially healthy twin building at 1111. I have lived in two condos managed by Taylor Management. These two companies have an approximately $10k difference and that is why our twin at 1111 switched to Aurther Edwards, which is the same price per year as Cervelli. The main reason our board does not want to switch is because Cervelli really does not watch or enforce what is being spent in petty cash, if you catch my drift. They also do not monitor where Jose spends most of his days, if you also catch my drift.
I have a lot of records of Cervelli’s failures and all of them were discussed with our board president in a State if NJ mandated ADR.
I have created a website were you can share your objections to Cervelli Management and review my specific, detailed, numerous complaints. I have also heard that our board will tamper with any votes by our owners. Thus, this website can unite us where we can verify our votes and our complaints. There is power on numbers and our building only needs a quorum of 20 people to mandate a change and over-rule the board if they fail us and our finances.
We do have to consider the problem may be at the top, our board, being that they take bad advice from Sekas Law instead of reading The NJ Condominium Act themselves—which only takes about an hour and is written in simple language. Kathleen will listen to people if they make a strong point but she is very slick in coming up with nonsensical excuses on the fly that stump people into bewilderment. Jonathan Marz is adverse to any change or improvement. Those two could sabotage any effort of a new management company. In any case, don’t let the board tell you it is their decision to spend money how they want. The fact is, that they are elected to run the day to day operations and field complaints. As far as making decisions, they are supposed to vote on our behalf based on the experiences and of the majority. There has to be a leader to survey the day to day but they do not have autocratic power over anything. The collective owners have the power, we elected them to listen and follow through.
GW