Competing Needs: Balancing Emotional Support Dog Requests and Resident Allergy and Anxiety Issues (IL)

Emotional support dogs (“Assistance Animals”) in “no-dog” buildings continue to raise sticky legal issues for community association boards and managers. As you will recall, the Illinois Assistance Animal Integrity Act (or “Act,” full text linked here) became effective on January 1, 2020. The Act mandates that if a community association receives an accommodation request for an Assistance Animal, the board must generally accommodate the request even in “no dog / no pet” buildings. The board may require the requesting resident to present “reliable documentation of the disability and disability-related need for the animal” provided by an individual or entity with a “therapeutic relationship” with the resident (if the disability-related need is not readily apparent or known to the board). With the Act now effective, there is little that a board can do to stand in the way of a resident keeping a dog in a no-dog building if the resident follows the Act processes.    Read the article………………………………….