For roughly a decade, a family in the gated Ashley Park community of Boca Raton kept a small flock of chickens in their backyard without a single complaint from the homeowners association. Then, seemingly overnight, the HOA gave them 14 days to tear down the coop and get rid of the birds — or start paying $100 a day until they did.
A Decade of Quiet, Then a Deadline
Homeowner Damir Kadribasic had raised chickens in his yard for years with no issue, according to local CBS affiliate CBS12’s reporting on the dispute. That changed when the Ashley Park Homeowners Association issued a formal notice citing the community’s governing documents, which restrict residents to keeping “only common domestic pets” on their property. The notice gave the family two weeks to comply before daily fines would begin accumulating.
The family did not go quietly. Neighbors circulated petitions and put up posters backing the Kadribasics’ right to keep the birds, and the family retained an East Boca attorney, David Rondon, to fight the notice. Rondon’s argument, as reported by CBS12, centered on two points: that the chickens were being kept purely as pets rather than for any commercial purpose, and that the HOA’s own notice never specified which particular bylaw provision the family had supposedly violated — a procedural gap that can matter enormously in HOA enforcement disputes.
Why Vague Notices Keep Backfiring on HOAs
Legal commentary on the case, published by the community-association law firm Siegfried Rivera, flagged the same weakness the family’s attorney zeroed in on: an enforcement letter that runs a single sentence and never cites the specific covenant being enforced gives a homeowner an opening to challenge the fine altogether. Associations that skip that step, the firm noted, tend to find themselves not just in a legal fight but in a public-relations one, as local television cameras show up to film upset neighbors holding signs.
That combination — a technically defensible rule paired with a poorly executed notice — is what turns an ordinary covenant dispute into the kind of story that makes the local news. It is also a pattern that repeats across the country wherever HOA fine authority runs up against a genuinely popular backyard hobby.
The Fines Are Real, Even If the Rules Are Fuzzy
The financial stakes in disputes like this one are not symbolic. Fine authority varies significantly by state: state-by-state HOA law summaries show California caps individual violation penalties at $100 per violation, while Virginia limits fines to $50 per violation or $10 a day for up to 90 days. Florida, where the Kadribasic dispute played out, imposes no statutory cap on daily HOA fines at all, which is part of why a $100-a-day penalty was even legally available to the board in the first place.
That gap between states is easy to overlook until a homeowner does the math on a two-week countdown. At $100 a day, a resident who waited even a month to resolve the dispute could be looking at $3,000 in fines — layered on top of whatever it costs to hire an attorney to argue that a decade-old backyard hobby was never against the rules to begin with.
A Pattern, Not an Isolated Incident
The Boca Raton case is far from unique. Backyard chicken disputes have become one of the more recognizable flashpoints between HOAs and homeowners nationally, precisely because the animals sit in a gray area that many governing documents never anticipated when they were drafted decades ago. A rule written to keep out livestock and commercial farming can end up sweeping in a handful of pet hens that a family has kept, and named, for years.
What these disputes tend to reveal is less about chickens and more about process. An HOA board that wants to enforce an unpopular rule needs a notice that actually says what was violated and why — otherwise, the fight moves from the coop to the courtroom, and the legal bills start climbing right alongside the daily fines.
The Bigger Housing Story Underneath
Backyard chicken disputes also sit inside a larger, ongoing tension in HOA governance: many covenants were written before backyard poultry-keeping became a mainstream hobby, and boards are often left interpreting decades-old language against a practice their original drafters never considered. That mismatch between old rules and new habits is a big part of why these disputes so often end up in front of a camera crew rather than getting settled quietly at a board meeting.
It also explains why attorneys who specialize in community-association law keep circling back to the same advice for boards: specificity in an enforcement notice is not a courtesy, it is protection. A vague citation invites exactly the kind of pushback the Ashley Park board received, and every week the dispute drags on is another week of daily fines stacking up on one side and legal fees stacking up on the other. For a family that spent a decade raising chickens without incident, the actual cost of a two-week ultimatum was never really about the birds.
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