Petitions: A Sauna Inspection Mandate for Every State

One ask, fifty states: give health departments a mandate to inspect and test gym saunas on complaint — with the power to close them until they are cleaned. Every state's petition is live, addressed to its current attorney general by name.

The ask

Every petition on this page asks a state for the same four things:

1. A mandate. Give the state or county health department explicit authority over gym saunas and steam rooms — the authority Florida’s health department told our founder, in so many words, that it does not have.
2. Complaint-triggered inspection and testing. When a member files a complaint, an inspector can enter, inspect, and swab/test the room — not mail the gym a letter.
3. Closure power. A sauna that fails can be shut until it is cleaned and re-tested, the way a restaurant or a pool can be.
4. Public results. Inspection outcomes posted and public, like restaurant grades and pool inspections.

That is not a radical program. It is the program that already exists for the pool ten feet away from the sauna in most gyms.

These petitions exist for one blunt reason: there is no mandate to enforce. A complaint cannot trigger an inspection that no law authorizes — ask the Florida health department, which said exactly that to our founder. Until a state writes the rule, every mold complaint filed anywhere in America lands in the same empty drawer his did. So the rule is what we are asking for.

Why it doesn’t exist now

Our nationwide research checked, and the gap our founder hit in Florida in 2024 is the national norm:

• Florida regulates gyms as “health studios” under a law about registration, bonds, and contracts — money, not hygiene. Nothing in it inspects sanitation, saunas, or mold.
• The CDC’s Model Aquatic Health Code — the national model — covers pools and hot tubs and is voluntary anyway. Dry saunas are not aquatic venues. They are in nobody’s code.
• The one real exception we found proves it can be done: New York City’s Health Code Article 165 permits and inspects bathing establishments — including sauna-only facilities. A city health code did what no state has bothered to do.

Pools get codes, permits, and inspections because they hold water. The dry sauna — the hottest, sweatiest, least-cleanable room in the building — is regulated almost nowhere. These petitions fix that, state by state.

The 50-state rollout

Each state gets a petition addressed to its own attorney general and governor, because consumer protection is the AG’s desk and mandates are the governor’s signature. A verified directory of all 50 state attorneys general — name, office, and official complaint route — is published in the grid below, and every state’s petition page is now live: the same four asks, your AG’s name, the complaint route that actually reaches them, and a sign form. (Bonus jurisdictions: the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have pages too.) Florida’s petition is the original — the case state — and the Report It center routes Florida consumers end-to-end.

A note on signatures: signing happens right on your state’s page. Signature delivery runs through our intake system; if the signing line is ever unreachable, the form says so plainly and does not record your name — we would rather lose a signature than fake one.