Parking restrictions and handicap/ADA compliance

Our three condo sub-associations asked our master association board to change the parking restrictions for the guest parking spots in their area. The master owns the roads and the parking spots on the road around their condos. They have had an ongoing problem with a few residents getting permits to park "overflow" cars in the guest parking spots long-term.

Tonight, as we were discussing the changes, one of the condo residents (the main offender) became very upset that we will only allow him to park in the guest parking for 72 hours per month with the new rules. He has a condo with a single-car garage and space for two additional vehicles in his driveway. He uses his garage for storage and parks his two cars in the driveway. In addition, he has a van that is handicap accessible that his wife inherited from her dad. That is the vehicle he parks long-term in the guest parking. He uses the van occasionally to drive his mother and mother-in-law to medical appointments. Both of the mothers live in care facilities, so there is actually no one with a disability living in his home. The van is licensed to him but he has two handicap hang-tags, one for each mother, that he uses to park in handicap spaces.

He read a statement tonight that the ADA required us to make a reasonable accommodation for parking of his van because he uses it to transport disabled adults and he has a handicap parking tag for it. When that argument didn't go anywhere, he says now he will park permanently in the handicap spaces at our clubhouse since he has a legal hang tag.

We tried to explain to him that a reasonable accommodation was to use his driveway or his garage. We also feel that since no one in the household is disabled, he doesn't really have an argument for parking full time in the handicap spot using a hang tag for someone who isn't physically in the community.

The two care facilities will not allow him to park the van in their parking lots because it doesn't belong to either of them and they don't drive - it's licensed to his wife.

He threatened to put in a HUD complaint saying we were discriminating against him. I know he doesn't have a real argument but does anyone see any pitfalls of us enforcing our parking rules on his accessible van? And not allowing him to park it permanently in the handicap spaces?

Thanks for any insights.

I meant: (1) the Board should not respond to his threats; and (2) the Board should enforce the parking rules.

You may want to run this past the association attorney just to be sure - because it's easy to get this stuff wrong and the penalties can be stiff - but I agree with the others that your resident is probably not entitled to an accommodation since he personally is not handicapped.

In addition, accommodations must be "reasonable". I think it's generally considered reasonable to require residents to use the parking spaces they have available to them first before they can use common area space as well. If they choose not to use their spaces for some reason (eg. using the garage as a storage area or not wanting to use the driveway because it means shuffling vehicles around), then that's their problem - it doesn't become an association problem. (This last comment was from our attorney when we were revising our parking restriction.)

But I recommend that you get your HOA attorney's blessing on this, because we're not lawyers and Fair Housing/ADA violations can be painful. In addition, if you can respond to your resident with a lawyer's opinion, he's less likely to push back.

This is a blatant, disgusting lie. HUD dismissed the complaint. This does not mean anything in the report was false. Typically it means that HUD cannot prove the claims in the complaint or the claims do not rise to a level where HUD is willing to take action.

How to report disabled parking permit abuse in Florida:

https://services.flhsmv.gov/parkingpermitabuse/ (download the form at the site; it's interesting)

I sure do not appreciate folks who are illegally using a parking space for disabled person. What if a disabled person comes along and cannot park because this owner's van is parked in the space (and without his mother or mother-in-law present et cetera)?

... said by nearly every board member at some point. A former PM of ours referred to it as adult daycare, and the "adult" part was questionable.

As I understand it, it is a Handicap Placard, not a Handicap license plate. The Placard follows the person. I the Placard holder is not in the vehicle, the Placard means nothing. Call the police for misuse of a Handicap Placard.