Florida Self Storage Lawsuits
Eyewitness News went undercover in Charlotte to discover how safe Public Storage is when no one is looking. In Charlotte alone, there are at least 35 Public Storage facilities, and Paul Trott served as manager for the last six years. However, he says in a pending lawsuit against Public Storage that over the past year, management has cut back on internal budgets so much that routine maintenance has stopped. The result, according to Paul Trott, is, “We can’t clean the unit.”
Public Storage Lawsuit
In this week’s edition of our weekly Eyewitness News report, we looked at the recent lawsuit involving an employee’s death in a storage unit in Charlotte. The story focused on one part of employee safety: how a former employer cut corners when it came to updating its insurance policies. According to the report, when the former employer, Bob Frohme, lost his job four years ago, he was never given a new policy by the former employer to keep him covered in case of an accident.
Instead, according to Frohme, who was disabled and unable to work, the new employer sent him to a storage facility for three days without his insurance. When interviewed by the news team, both the management of the warehouse and the employee said they had no idea that one had fallen and died there.
After news reports about this incident, the public began to ask questions about safety at other Charlotte storage facilities.
One storage unit manager said that he didn’t know anything about the incident because he wasn’t overseeing the operations. Another storage facility in Deedsport had similar problems with its employees not having insurance. An employee there told the news crew that he didn’t believe that the hospital or nursing home where his mother had gone for treatment had adequate security measures. Medical treatment can be very expensive, she said.
When news of these lawsuits reached the office of the North Carolina State Insurance Department, the division administrator contacted each of the Charlotte storage employers to find out more about their insurance policies.
According to the division administrator, none of the companies had adequate insurance coverage when their employees died on the job. He told the press that he would not recommend any of the companies to work with until he had conducted a review of their policies and procedures. According to the Insurance Department, this investigation has yet to be completed. The state is still waiting on the insurance company to complete this probe.
In response to the news, the American Society of Realtors and the Florida Apartment Association have formed a task force to look into public storage negligence issues.
These groups have been urging the state’s insurance department to conduct such an investigation. The task force is made up of people with law experience and they plan to meet with insurance company representatives to discuss tenant insurance policies. The goal is to determine if the loss of a potential tenant to a local storage facility was caused by poor customer service, inadequate security measures or other neglect issues. This task force is expected to submit a report within one month on its findings.
Many of the nation’s largest and most successful apartment and condo associations have had to deal with self-storage issues in the past.
Apartment associations that are located in areas with high crime rates, high unemployment, large numbers of mentally unstable individuals and more often than not unstable people, will have higher turnover rates as individuals become more wary of living with such a complex. Due to the increase in turnover rates, more renters are turning to self-storage facilities to take advantage of cheaper housing costs.
If the recent rash of self-storage lawsuits is any indication of the issues that are common at self-storage facilities nationwide, it appears that there may be room for additional litigation over the rights of renters in Florida self-storage facilities. As the nation braces for its fifth consecutive year of high unemployment levels and the problems that arise from this persistently high level of unemployment, it appears that renters and their rights may be the hottest issue facing renters in Florida right now.