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Coffee Talk (Tampa)
It's a new world
Walt Smith, court administrator for the 12th Judicial Circuit that includes Manatee and Sarasota counties, is among the objectors to a long-awaited report that supports making court records available on the Internet.
Smith and three other members of the Committee on Privacy and Court Records, appointed by the Florida Supreme Court, disagree with the majority that the electronic age has changed how we live.
The four contend the risks outweigh the benefits in a dissenting opinion written by 5th Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Jacqueline R. Griffin and joined by Smith, Tallahassee lawyer Kristin Adamson and Miami Circuit Judge Judith L. Kreeger. It is part of the report sent Aug. 15 to the high court by committee Chairman Jon Mills, a University of Florida law professor and former House speaker.
The committee voted 11-4 for electronic access after nearly two years of debate over transparent government and individuals' rights to privacy.
"No institution is immune from the transforming force of the digital age. We have entered a new world," states the report.
"The committee therefore approaches its task with a large measure of trepidation and urges all involved to move with care and thoughtfulness, and to be mindful at each step that the lives and liberties of present and future Floridians may well depend on the ability of the judicial branch of Florida to navigate this historic transition," states the report.
In 2003, Justice Harry Lee Anstead ordered court clerks to stop electronic access to records while the committee studied the problem.
Alpert: You got me
Through illness and divorce, retired Tampa lawyer Jonathan L. Alpert says he has remained true to himself and his profession.
Take a lawsuit that the Bank of Tampa has filed against Alpert.
The bank is looking for $226,357 that it loaned to Alpert and his law firm in 2002. Back then, Alpert was still a brash barrister winning big judgments for clients while occasionally infuriating opposing counsel with his courtroom tactics.
If Coffee Talk's memory is right, several of those judgments were obtained against banks.
The shoe is on the other foot now. Yet Alpert is only too willing to declare that the shoe fits.
Alpert has answered the Bank of Tampa suit by agreeing that a Hillsborough circuit judge should enter a judgment against him.
"The defendants have no justiciable defense in law or equity and the sums claimed to be owed are in fact owed and in default," writes Alpert, who is being sued along with the Alpert Law Firm PA.
In an accompanying footnote, he adds: "To assert a defense in this cause would be a violation of the Rules of Professional Responsibility as well as an imposition on scarce and precious judicial time and resources."
But just because Alpert has seen the light doesn't mean the Bank of Tampa will see its money soon.
"Basically, I've been ruined by the divorce from hell," Alpert says.
A court has ruled that his ex-wife, Stetson University law student Liz Alpert, is entitled to alimony. But the former husband claims he cannot pay due to multiple sclerosis and other ailments that forced him to close his law office.
Jonathan Alpert spent a night in jail two years ago before he found $104,935 for back alimony to satisfy a judicial order.
Liz Alpert, who moved to Sarasota after the divorce, is dubious about her former husband's various afflictions. She claims the MS flare-up was timed to thwart the courts, which have ordered her ex to support her while she pursues her legal education.
Jonathan Alpert says not even a personal bankruptcy reorganization could rid him of his alimony obligation. Although the Social Security Administration has deemed him permanently disabled, Alpert told Coffee Talk: "I'm going to do my best to repay my creditors."
This sand's gold
A recent sale on Indian Rocks Beach shows just how much investors prize beachfront on the Gulf Coast.
Indian Rocks Beach Development LLC paid about $12 million earlier this month for the site of the former Whispering Waters Resort Motel, 604 Gulf Blvd. That means the buyer, an affiliate of Tampa's Suarez Financial Group, paid about $328 a square foot.
Tampa financial planner Henry Suarez plans to build condominiums, to be called the Villas of Capri. Suarez proposes approximately 28 units, with each containing at least 2,500 square feet. He expects to start construction as soon as he completes the acquisition of a parking lot at the front of the site that he just bought.
This is Suarez's second condominium project in the Tampa Bay area. He's building an 18-unit project, the Villas Cesar, on St. Pete Beach.
Another warning
Pinellas Park bank analyst Richard X. Bove pooh-poohs affordability indices, which show skyrocketing home prices far outpacing tiny increases in personal income within hot real estate markets around the country.
"Americans are willing to reallocate their assets from other forms of consumption to housing," the Punk Ziegel & Co. analyst writes in an Aug. 16 research report.
But Bove does fear a sudden end to the housing bubble, and it will come when mortgage defaults start to litter the economic landscape. With borrowers, lenders, regulators and the secondary mortgage markets all refusing to apply the brakes, Bove sees a day of reckoning not far off.
"Nuclear mortgages" is what Bove calls the ingredient that will end the run-up in housing prices and the profits of selected banks. Those, of course, are the loans that start out with monthly payments of $581. Only the homebuyers, if they were borrowing in saner times, should be paying twice that.
"This boom will end when a large number of lenders lose a great deal of money," says Bove. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the main purchasers of these nukes, will take the worst hits.
"There is a reason why the three largest banks that make 40% of the nuclear mortgages are selling 75% of the product despite its inherent high yield," notes Bove. "They smell the risk."
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