Sacramento Watch: What a Board Owes an Owner Who Asks for Air Conditioning

AB 1684 would void any governing document, architectural guideline or policy that blocks a cooling system meeting code, and it attaches a two thousand dollar civil penalty plus attorney fees to a willful violation. The exposure sits with the board, not the association's lawyer.

AB 1684 would add section 4738 to the Civil Code. It voids any provision of the governing documents, architectural guidelines or policies that prohibits or restricts the installation, upgrade, replacement or use of a cooling system that complies with all applicable state and local building codes. It also makes it unlawful for an association to prohibit or restrict a member from installing one. An association that willfully violates it is liable to the member for actual damages, a civil penalty up to two thousand dollars paid to that member, and reasonable attorney fees and court costs.

The definition of cooling system is broader than most boards assume. It covers a portable air conditioning unit, a window air conditioning unit, a swamp cooler or any evaporative cooler, a cooling fan system, a heat pump, and any other technology that reasonably creates an internal temperature cooling benefit and meets applicable health and safety standards. Window units are explicitly in scope. For a lot of South Bay associations, the window unit is exactly the thing the architectural guidelines were written to keep off the building.

This language is not invented from scratch. It is lifted from the Mobilehome Residency Law, which has voided cooling restrictions in mobilehome parks for a while now. Sacramento is copying a rule that already exists in one housing type into Davis-Stirling. That matters for how you should read its odds. This is not an experimental idea looking for a constituency. It is an existing rule being extended, which is usually a sign the drafting has already survived one round of objections.

The part boards should sit with is the penalty structure, because of who it lands on. Two thousand dollars per violation plus attorney fees is not a large number by itself. It is a large number when the fee award is the real cost and the association is self-managed with a thin budget and no dedicated legal line item. A board that denies three cooling requests in a season on the strength of a guideline the statute has voided has manufactured three claims, and the fee exposure on each of them will dwarf the penalty.

Willfully is the word doing the work. An association that has never looked at its guidelines and approves the first request that comes in is in a very different posture than one that reads this article, changes nothing, and keeps denying. Documented awareness plus continued denial is what willful looks like to a court. That is an argument for putting this on the agenda and papering the decision, whichever way the bill goes.

What is still yours. The bill voids prohibitions and restrictions on installation and use. It does not hand owners the right to do the work badly. Compliance with state and local building codes is written into the standard, so permits, electrical capacity and structural attachment remain real requirements. Associations keep a legitimate interest in how a unit is mounted, how condensate drains, whether a through-wall penetration is sealed and flashed correctly, and who is responsible when it leaks into the unit below. Write those down as installation standards. Do not write them so tightly that they function as a ban, because a restriction that makes compliance impossible is the thing the statute is aimed at.

Three things for the next meeting. Read your architectural guidelines and your CC&Rs for anything that names air conditioning, window units, condensers, exterior equipment or roof-mounted equipment. Draft a cooling system installation standard that governs method rather than permission. And decide now what you will do with a request that arrives before the bill resolves, because August is when those requests actually come in.

This is not law yet. AB 1684 is on the Senate floor and the Legislature has to pass bills by August 31, so this resolves inside two weeks one way or the other. We covered the owner's side of this bill on our rental site, in a piece about what an HOA cannot stop you from doing to a unit you own. This one is the view from the board's chair.