A New York homeowners association spent two winters fining a Clarence family $100 a week for keeping an ice rink up in the wrong part of their yard, and a judge just told the HOA it never had the authority to make that rule in the first place. The Supreme Court of Erie County ruling, handed down January 6, 2026, voided roughly $2,000 in accumulated penalties against Matthew and Deanna Zinno and reads like a small master class in what an HOA board can and can’t do without a homeowner vote.
The Zinnos live in Waterford Village, a subdivision in Clarence, a suburb northeast of Buffalo. According to the case record published by FindLaw, the family put up a seasonal, plastic-lined rink in their yard one winter with no objection from anyone. The following year, Waterford Village Association’s architectural committee rolled out updated guidelines that restricted where rinks could go. The Zinnos kept theirs up anyway. The fines started stacking up at $100 a week, and by the time the family had enough and sued, the total had climbed to around $2,000.
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone who has ever side-eyed a rule their own HOA invented out of thin air. The Zinnos didn’t argue that ice rinks are harmless or that the board was being petty. They argued the board never had the power to ban them at all, at least not the way it tried to. Under the community’s founding Declaration, drawn up by the developer back in 2004, changing what’s allowed on a homeowner’s property requires 67% approval from the membership, spelled out in Article XI. The architectural guidelines the board actually used to justify the fines only need a simple board majority to change.
Judge Peter Allen Weinmann sided with the homeowners. Neither the original Declaration nor the community’s 2014 architectural guidelines said a word about ice rinks, seasonal or otherwise, according to the court’s findings as summarized by community-association publisher Associa. The board’s attempt to restrict them through a guideline update, the court found, was functionally an amendment to what homeowners are permitted to do with their own property, and that kind of change has to go through the Declaration’s amendment process, not a committee memo. New York courts also apply what’s called strict construction to restrictive covenants, meaning ambiguity gets resolved in the property owner’s favor, not the association’s.
The upshot: every dollar of those $100-a-week fines is void, the Zinnos are free to keep flooding their yard every winter, and Waterford Village Association is back to square one if it still wants a rink ban. That means putting the question to a vote and clearing the 67% threshold — a considerably higher bar than a board majority agreeing on a Tuesday.
Why this ruling matters beyond one snowy yard
Ice rinks are a delightfully specific hill to die on, but the legal principle underneath this case shows up constantly in HOA disputes nationwide: a board’s day-to-day rulemaking power is not the same as the community’s constitutional amendment power, and the two get confused all the time. Architectural committees issue guidance on paint colors, fence heights, holiday lighting and yes, backyard rinks, often assuming that authority is unlimited. Zinno v. Waterford Village Association is a reminder that it isn’t: if a rule change reaches into what owners are actually permitted to build or do on their land, most state laws and most governing documents route that decision back to the membership.
For homeowners fighting a fine they think their board overstepped on, the Zinno case offers a concrete playbook: pull the original Declaration, find the amendment threshold, and check whether the rule you’re being fined under actually cleared that bar or just showed up in a committee update. For boards, it’s a caution against treating architectural guidelines as a backdoor around the vote they’d rather skip.
A pattern that keeps landing in court
Backyard ice rinks have become an oddly reliable source of HOA litigation across cold-weather states in recent winters, and the fact pattern tends to rhyme: a board decides mid-season that a longstanding tradition needs restricting, residents keep doing what they’ve always done, and fines pile up faster than either side expects. What makes Zinno stand out is how cleanly it separates two things people often lump together — whether an HOA rule is reasonable, and whether the board actually had the authority to make it. The court never had to decide if backyard rinks are a nuisance, an eyesore, or a beloved neighborhood tradition. It only had to decide whether a handful of people on an architectural committee could rewrite the rules of what an entire subdivision is allowed to do with their yards. They couldn’t, at least not without asking everyone else first.
Index number 803650/2023 is now closed, but its lesson for New York’s many HOA-governed subdivisions is durable. Guideline updates are easy to pass and easy to challenge. Declaration amendments are hard to pass and hard to challenge. Boards that reach for the easy tool to do the hard tool’s job are building fines on sand. Winter is coming again in Clarence, and this time, the rink stays.
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