ABQ Fire charges $300/call for false alarms after the first three. It steps up to $500 after number ten. There is, of course, also the $25 annual permit fee for a reporting alarm system. Failure to comply with these fees is a misdemeanor. Just in case some local precedent will help advocate :)

Honestly it's remarkable to me to think that anyone ever gets to that $500 "excessive" tier, I've had one false alarm where the fire department attended in years of having an alarm system and I was mortified. felt like the biggest idiot in the world.

Pretty common in lots of places - you get charged after n false-alarms and are required to fix your broken sensors or whatever is causing the issue.

A tradie doing some welding in the kitchen I was working in some years back told me this as he disabled the smoke alarm (to prevent a false alert while he was welding): "if you set off a false alert on the fire alarm, quickly set fire to the wastepaper bin - it saves you from paying the false alert fee"

I learned this from my last landlord after I kept causing issues for the whole building by cooking bacon. The detector was installed ABOVE THE STOVE. It was cheaper for him to move the detector than to pay for the repeat call outs over a mildly smoky apartment due to my need for crispy almost burnt bacon…

Pretty sure that'll just drive people to turn it off. Or if they can't, try and set a small fire or something to get out of paying the fine

These are elegant solutions imo.

For example, my condo in Toronto charges $800 per false call.

It should probably be X$ per alarm regardless of it being false or not, minus first N per year.