A governance battle has erupted inside one of Miami Beach's older high-rise condominium communities, with a group of unit owners claiming they legally removed every member of the South Bay Club Condominium Association's board — all seven directors simultaneously — through a written consent document rather than a formal meeting and vote.

The ousted directors disagree, and a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge will now have to settle a genuinely unsettled legal question: can a condominium association's own bylaws set a lower threshold of signatures for a board recall than Florida state law's default requirement?

The lawsuit, filed July 24 in the 11th Judicial Circuit, names all seven current board members as defendants — Aileen Upshon, Louis Petrole, Pablo Lafforgue, Todd Edwards, Patrick Kedziora, Gustavo Pradilla, and Michael Fournier — each of whom owns a unit at South Bay Club, located at 800 West Avenue in Miami Beach.

None of the defendants have yet filed a response, and the allegations in the complaint are unproven. They are entitled to respond and could not be reached for comment.

The plaintiff leading the recall effort is Daniel Marinberg, a Miami-Dade County-based real estate attorney and broker who operates Condobuyout.com, a firm that specializes in brokering bulk sales of aging South Florida condominiums to developers.

According to the complaint, Marinberg does not hold title to a unit at South Bay Club in his own name; rather, his single-member LLC, DMCC 800 West, LLC — listed as a co-plaintiff — owns unit 303. The complaint does not identify Marinberg as living at the property.

He is suing both individually and as "Unit Owners' Representative," a role the complaint says he was appointed to by the other unit owners who signed on to the recall.

Public records show a separate entity, "800 West Ave Bulk Owner, LLC," was registered with the Florida Division of Corporations in November 2024 — more than a year before this lawsuit — with Marinberg listed as both registered agent and authorized member, suggesting he had been building a position at the property well before the governance dispute became public. The complaint itself is framed entirely as a bylaws and governance matter and makes no mention of any development or buyout interest.

Marinberg's track record in the area is notable. Per reporting by Bisnow in October 2025, he brokered the $120 million bulk sale of the 238-unit Bay Garden Manor at 1250 West Avenue — just a few blocks from South Bay Club — to developers JDS Development and Terra Group.

Marinberg was both the broker and an owner of five units in that building and said at the time he was working on roughly ten other buyout deals across Miami-Dade County. The Journal has separately reported that at least ten eviction suits were filed against Bay Garden Manor tenants as that redevelopment moved through its final city approvals this summer.

The legal fight over quorum and consent

At the center of this case is a procedural question that turns on a clause buried in a 1991 amendment to the association's bylaws. Florida law sets the default quorum for a condominium members' meeting at a majority of all voting interests — meaning more than half of all unit owners would typically need to participate before a recall vote could occur.

But the complaint argues that the same statute explicitly allows bylaws to set a lower number. According to the lawsuit, South Bay Club's bylaws, as amended in 1991, established a quorum of just one-third of the total units.

Because the bylaws also allow directors to be removed by a two-thirds vote of those constituting a quorum, the plaintiffs contend that written consent signatures from two-thirds of one-third of all units — roughly 78 units — is legally sufficient to recall the entire board without a formal meeting.

A written-consent recall is exactly what it sounds like: rather than gathering owners in a room and holding a vote, the recall organizers circulate a document that unit owners sign to authorize the removal. Florida law permits this method, and the association's own bylaws include a provision allowing members to take action by written consent in lieu of a meeting.

The complaint states that by July 14, 2026, Marinberg had gathered signatures from more than two-thirds of one-third of all unit owners, and filed the consent with the board naming seven replacement directors including Kevin Saeed, David Campbell, Alexander Wendell, Shaun Jordan, Thomas Inman, Brendan Fleming, and Sven Schulz.

The defendant directors, according to the complaint, contend the recall was ineffective. The plaintiffs are asking the court for a declaratory judgment confirming the recall was valid as of July 14, and an injunction blocking the current board from taking any action beyond routine building management while the case is litigated.

A building under strain

South Bay Club is separately entangled in ongoing litigation over its finances. A prior lawsuit filed by the association against unit owner James Weingarten — alleging he sabotaged a $2.7 million emergency repair loan — resulted in a denial of the association's emergency injunction request in June 2026, a ruling the Journal has not previously reported.

The two cases do not appear to be legally connected, but together they paint a picture of a building navigating overlapping crises on multiple fronts.

The full complaint, including the written consent document and association bylaws, is available here.