Zweig v. Il Villaggio Condominium Assoc., Inc. ( 2017 )

Third District Court of Appeal
State of Florida
Opinion filed January 4, 2017.
Not final until disposition of timely filed motion for rehearing.
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No. 3D16-934
Lower Tribunal No. 15-12831
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Mollie Zweig,
Appellant,
vs.
Il Villaggio Condominium Association, Inc.,
Appellee.
An Appeal from the Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, Jorge E. Cueto,
Judge.
Siegfried, Rivera, Hyman, Lerner, De La Torre, Mars & Sobel, P.A., and
Nicholas D. Siegfried and Diane J. Zelmer, for appellant.
Halpern Rodriguez, LLP, and Marc A. Halpern and Priscilla S. Zaldivar, for
appellee.
Before WELLS, LAGOA, and LOGUE, JJ.
LOGUE, J.
In the case below, the appellant unit owner filed a lawsuit seeking an
injunction to require the appellee condominium association to “refrain from
approving the vertical unit combination” of two units of a neighboring owner. The
trial court entered summary judgment against her because her lawsuit was not ripe.
We affirm.
Although the condominium association’s board allowed the neighboring unit
owner’s engineer to preliminarily test a concrete slab to determine if combining the
units was structurally feasible, no application for permission to combine the units
had been filed. As the case stood at the time of summary judgment, therefore, the
application to combine the units may ultimately not be filed. If filed, the
application may not be approved, and if unlawfully approved, sufficient legal and
equitable remedies will exist to address any potential harm to the appellant unit
owner. In these circumstances, the claim that the unit owner might be harmed if an
application is filed, and if the application is granted, is too attenuated to support a
lawsuit. See Condos. on Intracoastal Ass’n, Inc. v. Barnett Bank of Palm Beach
Cty., 502 So. 2d 84, 86 (Fla. 4th DCA 1987) (suit to bar association from
conducting a meeting to consider amendment to declaration of condominium was
premature because the “record contains no evidence to support a finding that the
members of the condominium association will in fact pass the amendment”). See
generally, Hernandez v. Bd. of Comm’rs of Hillsborough Cty., 153 So. 790, 791
(1934) (“Mere allegations that a board of county commissioners is threatening to
pass resolutions or edicts which, if passed, will be unlawful or ineffective,
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constitute no ground for injunctive interference with the preliminary internal
functioning of the county board.”).
Affirmed.
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