Data-driven sober home rules advance

Delray Beach soon may be able to collect data on sober homes that will help form future regulation of the booming recovery industry. Cit y commissioners gave their first nod of approval Tuesday to the ordinances that will make that collection possible.

The City Commission unanimously agreed to require group homes, including sober homes that operate under federal protections that exempt them from local regulations, to annually certify through the city.

This ordinance, after a second round of approval, would allow the city to collect information on sober homes before proposing data-driven regulations.

“I believe the commission will likely be considering performing a study to gather data to see where we can go from here,” said Terrill Pyburn, special council to the city and a former Delray Beach assistant city attorney who has tackled sober home legislation for more than a decade.

Substantial changes to how sober homes are regulated could come within months, Pyburn added.

“The city is going about this methodically and carefully, seeing mistakes made in other areas, but also recognizing successes in other areas,” Mayor Cary Glickstein said at Tuesday’s meeting.

The city must move with caution because those in recovery are considered members of a protected class.

The federal government considers addiction a disability and therefore protects recovering addicts from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under that act, sober homes can request “reasonable accommodations” that exempt the homes from local regulations on how many unrelated people can live in a single-family residence.

Delray Beach currently requires sober homes to certify for “reasonable accommodation” only once through a written request. The new regulations would force the homes to seek “reasonable accommodation” each year, giving officials an opportunity to scrutinize whether the homes still qualify for the accommodation.

The city then can step up its regulation of sober homes thanks to guidelines released by federal officials in November.

The guidelines, released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Justice, clarified for cities the legal ability to regulate the proliferation of sober homes.

One change: cities will be able to restrict the number of sober homes allowed in a given area, if the city finds that the homes are a strain on financial resources.

The ordinance will appear before the commission for final approval on Jan. 25.