The following is from County Executive Steuart Pittman and was posted on the County Executive’s Facebook page.

This summer, the air conditioning at the Elms at Laurel Park went out again during a heat wave. Residents were left struggling as the temperature in these 254 apartments rose to 90 degrees. County staff and volunteers knocked on doors to offer water and cooling relief to residents, but we had no way to address these repeated outages as the county code did not require properties to maintain air conditioning systems.

Today, I signed Bill 79-25 into law, which requires owners of multiple dwelling residential properties who provide air conditioning to tenants to maintain the system in good working order. In case of outages, the county can now require owners to provide alternative cooling relief to keep residents safe, and can issue fines to ensure property owners resolve the outage quickly.

I want to thank the residents of the Elms for alerting us to these unsafe conditions, the County Council for their unanimous support of this legislation, and the staff and volunteers with Anne Arundel County Department of Health, Anne Arundel County Office of Emergency Management, Community Engagement and Constituent Services, and Anne Arundel County and City of Annapolis CERT for supporting our residents during the outage and working together to find a solution.