Emotional Support Animal (ESA) Letters in Dodge City, KS

A high-renting city in the southwest

Dodge City has 3,955 renting households out of 9,104 occupied homes: 43.4 percent on the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimate, eleven points above the 32.8 percent Kansas figure and sixth of the state’s twenty largest cities by share, behind Manhattan, Lawrence, Emporia, Junction City and Leavenworth.

Median gross rent is $1,045, fifteen dollars under the $1,060 Kansas median. The 2024 Census estimate puts the city at 27,663, fifteenth in Kansas and 333 people behind Garden City fifty miles west.

Two southwest Kansas cities of nearly the same size, both renting at close to the state median, both with a lot of short tenancies. Which brings this page to the mistake that ends more Kansas deposit claims than any dispute about animals.

K.S.A. 58-2550(d)

“Except as otherwise provided by the rental agreement, a tenant shall not apply or deduct any portion of the security deposit from the last month’s rent or use or apply such tenant’s security deposit at any time in lieu of payment of rent. If a tenant fails to comply with this subsection, the security deposit shall be forfeited and the landlord may recover the rent due as if the deposit had not been applied or deducted from the rent due.”

The reasoning that leads people here is entirely intuitive. The landlord holds a month’s rent as a deposit. You are leaving. Why pay a final month and then chase the same amount back?

Because the statute answers that question with two separate consequences, and they are cumulative:

1. You forfeit the deposit. Not the disputed part, the deposit.
2. The landlord recovers the rent anyway, “as if the deposit had not been applied.”

You lose the money and still owe the money.

The one exception, and it is narrow

“Except as otherwise provided by the rental agreement.” So a lease may permit it, and almost none does. If yours does, it will be in writing; if you are relying on something someone said, you are relying on nothing.

Why this belongs on a page about assistance animals

Because it is how the animal argument gets lost after it has been won.

Suppose a Dodge City landlord charged a pet deposit for an animal that was a required accommodation. That charge should not have been made: K.S.A. 58-2550(a) authorises the additional half-month only “if the rental agreement permits the tenant to keep or maintain pets in the dwelling unit,” and an accommodation animal is not there on the agreement’s permission. Independently, K.S.A. 44-1016(h)(2) reaches it as discrimination in “the terms, conditions or privileges” of a rental.

That is a good claim. It is a claim to get money back.

A tenant who decides to recover it by not paying the last month’s rent triggers subsection (d), forfeits the whole deposit (including the part that should never have been taken), and still owes the rent. The good claim is now attached to money that has been forfeited by statute.

The route to recovering an unlawful charge is to raise it, in writing, and use the statutory mechanism. Never self-help at the end of the tenancy.

The mechanism that does work

K.S.A. 58-2550(b). The balance of the deposit is due within fourteen days after the landlord determines the amount of expenses, damages or other legally allowable charges, and in no event more than thirty days after termination of the tenancy, delivery of possession and demand by the tenant.

Make the demand in writing when you hand over possession. The thirty days do not start without it. If no demand is made within thirty days of termination, the subsection has the landlord mail the amount due to your last known address, which is a weaker position than a running deadline.

K.S.A. 58-2550(c). Where the landlord fails to comply, the tenant may recover the portion due “together with damages in an amount equal to 1½ the amount wrongfully withheld.”

That multiplier is the reason the statutory route beats the intuitive one. At Dodge City’s $1,045 median rent, the unfurnished deposit cap under 58-2550(a) is about a month’s rent, and one and a half times a wrongful retention is real money.

What may be kept

Under subsection (b), the deposit may be applied to accrued rent and “the amount of damages which the landlord has suffered by reason of the tenant’s noncompliance with K.S.A. 58-2555 … and the rental agreement, all as itemized by the landlord in a written notice delivered to the tenant.”

Damage an approved animal actually caused is inside that. An accommodation is permission to keep the animal despite a rule, not indemnity for what it does, and the itemisation requirement is worth insisting on, because a list can be checked and a figure cannot.

The accommodation claim, and its own clock

K.S.A. 44-1016(h)(3)(B): discrimination includes “a refusal to make reasonable accommodations in rules, policies, practices or services, when such accommodations may be necessary to afford such person equal opportunity to use and enjoy residential real property,” with 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B) behind it.

The discrimination charge and the deposit claim run on different calendars. K.S.A. 44-1005(i) puts the Kansas complaint window at six months after the act (the last act, where a continuing pattern is alleged), and sends it to the commission K.S.A. 44-1003 establishes. The chapter 58 deposit claim has nothing to do with that timetable, and a refusal in March on a lease ending in December expires in September.

What to do instead, in order

The route that recovers an unlawful charge without triggering subsection (d) is short.

Raise it in writing while the tenancy runs. A charge identified and objected to during the lease is a live claim; one discovered at move-out is an argument.

Pay everything, including the final month. Whatever is owed comes back through the statute, not through withholding.

Demand the deposit in writing at handover, and ask for the itemisation in the same message.

Then use K.S.A. 58-2550(c) if anything was wrongly kept. One and a half times is a better return than the deposit you would have forfeited.

And do not let a dispute about the charge become a dispute about rent. They are separate claims with separate consequences, and merging them converts a strong accommodation argument into a straightforward failure to pay.

What has to be true before either

Whoever already treats you comes first. In Ford County that is a short list: southwest Kansas has very little behavioural health capacity, the nearest large clinical bench is Wichita around two and a half hours east, waits run into months, and Spanish-language services are scarcer still in a city where many households speak it at home.

If nobody is treating you, a licensed evaluation covers the same ground on purpose. A licensed clinician decides whether a disability exists and whether this animal answers it, then writes the determination or explains the refusal.

Get the accommodation established, raise the charge in writing, demand the deposit at move-out, and pay the last month’s rent.