Texting residents

We provide our Property Managers a cell phone so our Corporate staff can reach them and if there is an emergency the answering service can reach them. To protect our staffs time, and keep professional boundaries we do not give out the number to residents. We also discourage our PM's from emailing residents. We manage Affordable homeless/low income housing. I am finding more of my staff giving out their number and getting into texting conversations with residents. I have a disgruntled resident who has emailed me every text she has received, complaining about my PM and one is even taking my PM to court using the texts as part of her case. What protocols do you use when it comes to texting residents? 

I think texting should be treated just like any other form of communications in terms of training appropriate behavior. I'm not sure if there is fundamentally an issue with a text versus another type of communication? They shouldn't be using their personal phone, however, and there are texting services that the community can use for that purpose.

"ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS. No electronic communications will be considered written notice or official communication with the exclusive exemption of electronic mail sent from the [corporate] address by the Agent/ Owner to the Resident with a responsive read-receipt request. No electronic 'texting' or multimedia/short message service (MMS/SMS) communication will be accepted for any maintenance or operations concern. Electronic communication is defined as per Section 2510(12) of Title 18 of the United States Code. "

We get some questions about this, but the deal is that if we accept it as communication, so will the court. So it's great that X manager and Y resident share friendly banter over text. When X manager decides to take another opportunity, and Y resident thinks their message to X about a Serious Issue is being addressed... Or they send it and the manager just doesn't get it because the manager is in the basement... or the manager fires off a silly response the resident thinks means they're handling it when the manager just wants more information... lots of scenarios. We want the back-up that says, "Nope. This is not the way."