RE Q&A: Can HOA Enforce Smoking Ban in Common Areas?

Whilst indoor smoking cigarettes is usually banned, some condo associations have started out nixing it in outdoor areas – but it probably involves a the greater part vote of unit entrepreneurs.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Problem: At our annual meeting, our condominium local community handed a “No Smoking” resolution into our bylaws. It encompassed the full club space, like the outdoor services.

We now have a modest team of new proprietors who vocally oppose this ban and continue to smoke at our community pool in spite of quite a few requests to halt. How can we implement the ban? – Jerry

Reply: Using tobacco has been banned indoors in condominium typical areas for a although. The current trend is to ban smoking in outside popular locations, like the pool, and in minimal popular components, these as balconies.

To see if your affiliation has the appropriate to do this, you need to critique the condominium’s declaration. If allowed, it will have to have to be voted on by a recommended the greater part of the unit owners. As very long as all of these hoops are jumped by way of, the ban goes into effect.

Generally, if a group rule is affordable, it will be upheld if challenged in court. A cigarette smoking ban, even outside the house on a balcony or in the pool place, would most likely be uncovered to be acceptable because of the properly-identified wellbeing troubles associated with secondhand smoke.

The logic would apply to similar routines, this kind of as pipe cigarette smoking or vaping.

Your community can implement the new rule the exact way it would any other rule. Very first, a warning letter ought to be despatched to the offending house owner. If this does not get the job done, they can be fined for breaking the regulations.

This condition is starting to be even further complicated by the climbing use of professional medical cannabis. If it had been legal, it appears to be that leisure marijuana would be dealt with in the same way to tobacco.

On the other hand, an argument can be made that prescribed cannabis may possibly be accepted in some scenarios as a fair accommodation underneath housing and incapacity laws.

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