Topic: Service & Support Animals/ADA

I manage a 30 unit LIHTC complex with a total of 6 Support and/or Service animals. We have 1 tenant on the ground floor who is both physically disable and also suffers from PTSD. I was informed in a hearing yesterday that although we require animals to be leashed and with their owners when outside of the unit, I am violating this one tenants' ADA rights by not allowing him to tie his dog to his couch and let him roam the breezeway and grassy areas as he pleases.
My thought is, if I allow this for one tenants support/service animal, would i not have to allow this for the other animal on the ground floor, and all other animals on the 2nd and 3rd floor also?
I was also told that due to his issues I am required to communicate with him differently, exclude him from bulk emails to the building about issues, and give him more detailed explanations than others are given.
Am I wrong in thinking that as a tenant he should be required to follow all policies just as any other tenant? In all of my training I have been told you must treat everyone, including a wheelchair bound applicant, the same, offer to show everyone the same units even if getting to the 3rd floor in a wheelchair is difficult. But in this situation I am required to give the ADA person special privileges that I am not able to provide any other tenant.

I am not an expert in this field or a lawyer, and even my knowledge would be more geared towards Fair Housing and not being ADA compliant, so take this with a grain of salt... It sounds like there are two aspects of this:

1) Can you have one set of rules for the service animal relative to other animals in the building.

Even though both are technically animals, a service animal is fundamentally different. A community's restrictions on "pets" will be different than how it deals with service animals, so you would not need to give all animals the same latitude as you do a service animal.

2) Can you restrict the service animal from wandering around the community without a leash? That is a difficult one, as I have heard that a service animal should be seen as an extension of the person. That said, I think some restrictions are allowed, such as animals in the pool. Let me see if I can get someone with more knowledge on the subject to chime in.

Not sure who you spoke with or what kind of hearing you attended and unless your breezeways and grassy areas are open to the public, this is NOT an ADA issue; it is a fair housing issue. The ADA only applies to your public areas.

Under FHA, we are required to approve requests for accommodations that meet the definition of reasonable, and are necessary for the resident to enjoy living at your community. If this particular resident can furnish you with documentation from a reliable source, that it is necessary for his assistive animal to be tied to a couch and/or free to roam the grassy areas, than you may have to allow that if it meets the definition of reasonable (I don't see how it could!) and there is no reasonable alternative to the resident's request. Absent such documentation, if it were my community, I would require the animal to be on a leash whenever it was outside the apartment home.

You don't have to treat everyone the same; you should treat every situation the same. That may mean you have different rules for different situations.

Please remember that I am NOT an attorney and am only sharing what I would do if it were my community.

Doug's remarks are right on point. I might add that if a person has a disability IE seizures, that requires that the animal NOT be on a leash, we must accommodate.
Every time I think I know everything about FH, you guys come up with new situations that that head-scratchers.

Thank you all for your comments and thoughts. We did meet with an attorney from disability law, and were pleased to find out that we were correct in how we handled everything. Basics are, treat everyone the same unless someone with a disability requests a reasonable accommodation.