Vermont Voids Any Covenant That Bans a Clothesline

Section 544 sits in Title 27, the property title, in the chapter on conveyance of real estate, and it was added by 2009, No. 45, § 15d, effective May 27, 2009. Its placement matters. It operates on deed restrictions, covenants, and similar binding agreements running with the land, not on a particular kind of association, so it applies to a condominium declaration, a planned community declaration, a subdivision covenant recorded in the town land records, and a private agreement between neighbors alike. Unlike 27A V.S.A. § 3-120, the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act rule provision, § 544 carries no cutoff date for pre-1999 communities and no minimum unit count. If the restriction runs with the land in Vermont, the section reaches it.

The prohibition is written twice over. First, a covenant may not prohibit the listed devices. Second, and more usefully, a covenant may not have the effect of prohibiting them. That second phrase is what defeats the workaround a Vermont board is most likely to try: an architectural rule that never says the word clothesline but sets conditions no clothesline can meet, such as banning anything visible from a road or requiring every exterior addition to be screened from all neighboring units. If the practical result is that no clothesline can be hung, § 544 treats the restriction the same as an outright ban.

The list of protected equipment is short and specific: solar collectors, clotheslines, and other energy devices based on renewable resources. The statute does not define that last phrase, and Vermont has not filled it in by rule, so the safe reading is that the clearly renewable equipment a homeowner installs on a building is covered while equipment that merely saves energy is not obviously within the words. A retractable line off the back wall, a pulley line, a wall-mounted drying rack, and a rooftop or wall-mounted solar array all sit squarely inside the language.

Read the placement words carefully, because they are the real limit. The protection runs to devices installed on buildings erected on the lots or parcels covered by the restriction. A line strung from the house to a post, or a bracket-mounted line on the wall or deck, is installed on a building. A freestanding umbrella dryer set in the middle of the yard with no attachment to any structure is harder to fit inside that phrase, and Vermont has not legislated a yard-drying right the way it has a building-mounted one. Homeowners who want the strongest position should mount the line to the dwelling.

The second limit is the express exclusion in subsection (c): the section does not apply to patio railings in condominiums, cooperatives, or apartments. A Vermont condominium association may still ban owners from draping laundry over a balcony or patio railing, and it may enforce that ban even against someone using the railing as a drying rack. The exclusion is about the railing itself, not about a properly mounted line elsewhere on the unit.

Subsection (c) also states the legislature's reason for the section, which is to encourage the development and use of renewable resources in order to conserve and protect the value of land, buildings, and resources by preventing measures that drive the cost of owning and operating property beyond what private owners can maintain. That is not decoration. A Vermont court reading an ambiguous covenant against a homeowner's drying rack has the legislature's stated purpose to weigh, and the purpose runs toward the homeowner.

One practical point. Section 544 voids the prohibition, not the association's ability to have any rules at all. It gives a reviewing entity an express location power only for solar collectors, and only within a southern orientation, so there is no parallel statutory grant letting a board dictate where a clothesline goes. A board that adopts a clothesline placement rule is relying on its general rule power under 27A V.S.A. § 3-102(a)(1) and § 3-120, and the rule still has to be reasonable under § 3-120(h) and must not have the effect of prohibiting the line.

This is a right you enforce yourself, not one a state agency polices. No Vermont department licenses or inspects covenants, and § 544 creates no fine or civil penalty against an association that keeps an unlawful clothesline ban on its books. What the section gives you instead is a fee shift: subsection (b) provides that in any litigation arising under the section, the prevailing party is entitled to costs and reasonable attorney's fees. That runs both ways, so an owner who sues over a device outside the protected list, or over a patio railing the statute excludes, can be ordered to pay the association's fees.

§ 4-117(a), under which a unit owner may sue to enforce a right granted or an obligation imposed by the title, the declaration, or the bylaws, with the court free to award reasonable attorney fees and costs. Practically, the sequence is to put the § 544 citation in writing to the board before spending anything, because a Vermont board that keeps fining after being shown the statute is the fact pattern the fee-shift provision was written for. § 3-116(a), so contest them rather than letting them accrue.