Where the line now sits

The decision does not weaken Florida's right to charge; it locates it. The statutory right is a right to install at the owner's expense, within the owner's limited common element, on the owner's own metering. It is not authority to reconstruct shared electrical infrastructure.

The practical distinction is whether the proposed installation:

• runs conduit through, or attaches to, common elements;
• taps or modifies association electrical panels or service;
• restricts other residents' access to shared infrastructure; or
• creates future maintenance-access obligations for the association.

An installation that does none of those is squarely within the statutory right. One that does several is in the territory this case describes.

What belongs on a board's application form

The most useful consequence of this decision is that it validates a real application process. A board may lawfully ask for more than the five statutory items, and the sensible list is:

1. Plans and specifications, including the proposed conduit route and every point at which it meets common elements.
2. Electrical detail — the circuit, the panel, the load calculation, and whether association service is involved at any point.
3. Proof of separate metering, or the billing arrangement proposed. The absence of metering was a specific trial-court finding here.
4. Licensed contractor and permit information, insurance, and indemnity.
5. Restoration obligations on removal or sale.

Two cautions on process. Requirements must be reasonable — the statute bars prohibition, and a set of conditions so onerous as to amount to a prohibition invites the opposite result. And applications carry whatever response period the documents specify; silence is not denial, and it is not a defence.

What it means for an owner

The owners here installed after the denial. That is the fact that produced an injunction rather than a negotiation, and it generalises: self-help past a denial converts a statutory-interpretation dispute into an injunction case, with the association seeking removal and disconnection.

The route the statute contemplates is to propose a compliant installation — within your own space, separately metered, not through the common elements — and to press the association on the five conditions if it refuses. Where the only feasible route genuinely does cross common elements, that is a conversation about the 75 percent vote, not a question the owner can resolve unilaterally.

The procedural posture, stated honestly

This affirms a temporary injunction. The merits case continues in the county court, and the slip opinion carries the notation “Opinion subject to revision prior to official publication.” The decision was issued four weeks ago, so the rehearing window may still be open or only recently closed; we have not verified whether rehearing was sought.

None of that undercuts its usefulness as guidance — it is a written, citable panel opinion construing the statute — but anyone relying on it in a live dispute should confirm its current status.

The wider point about statutory rights in Florida associations

There is a pattern worth noticing across this year's Florida decisions, and it is consistent. Statutory carve-outs from association authority tend to be read narrowly, against their own terms, with everything outside them left to ordinary covenant authority.

The Division took the same approach to the condominium flag statute, holding that s. 718.113(4) protects one portable, removable United States flag displayed respectfully and “does not extend to a United States flag which has been altered or modified by additional symbolic elements.” The Fourth DCA took it to a building-code exemption, holding in Sable Pass Community Association v. Call that the chickee-hut exemption in s. 553.73(10)(i) “merely creates an exemption from the Florida Building Code” and “contains no language abrogating a private homeowners' association's authority.”²

Three different statutes, three different decision-makers, one interpretive posture: a specific statutory protection does not become a general exemption from the covenants.

What to watch next

Whether the merits case produces a second opinion, and whether other districts adopt the subsection (8)/(9) negative inference — it is the reasoning most likely to travel. Note also that the Legislature did not touch EV charging in either the 2025 or 2026 regular session, so the statute this case construes is the statute that will be in force through the 2027 session, which convenes on 2 March 2027.