An Owners' Question

In October 2025, the Board approved a 2026 operating budget that raises annual dues from $96 per unit to $150 per unit, a 56 percent increase. In May 2026, the Board circulated an announcement notifying unit owners of a newly adopted Rules and Regulations document that includes a fines rule: after written notice and a cure period, the Executive Board may impose penalties of up to $25 per day until a violation is corrected, with each continuing day treated as a separate violation. Both moves expand the financial demands of the Association. Neither move was made urgent by anything that materially changed about the property we collectively own.

Two features of the fines rule are worth reading closely. An owner who disputes a violation or a fine appeals to the same Executive Board that issued it, the body serving as accuser and judge at once. And any unpaid fine becomes a statutory lien on the owner's unit, collectible in the same manner as any other assessment, which is the legal machinery that ends, at its furthest extent, in foreclosure. A $25-per-day penalty that compounds daily, is appealed only to the people who imposed it, and attaches to your home as a lien is a materially different instrument than a one-time citation.

Some of the Board's framing on the fines is technically accurate. The Board does have fining authority under Pennsylvania's Uniform Planned Community Act and under our own Declaration. But authority is not the same as good governance, and a body whose budget and enforcement reach are both expanding at the same time is worth a serious second look.

Where the money actually goes.

The 2026 budget itself, approved by the Board on October 30, 2025, is a useful document. It shows total approved expenses of $16,610 against total approved income of $16,632. Of those expenses, roughly $4,500 to $6,250 covers actual physical maintenance of the Common Elements (grounds, ponds, drainage, tree work, detention pond inspection). The rest, about $10,000 per year, covers legal fees, insurance, reserves contribution, operations, and administration of the Association as an entity. Reserves stood at $103,247 as of October 30, 2025, roughly $956 per unit.

One line item is worth singling out. The 2026 budget contributes $6,100 to reserves, about 37 percent of all expenses. Reserves already stand at $103,247, an amount that compares favorably against the modest future capital needs of three small Common Element lots and a stormwater system that was last inspected for $1,750. Continuing to add $6,100 per year on top of that accounts for roughly $56 of every owner's 2026 dues. Healthy reserves are a good thing. Over-collecting on top of already-healthy reserves, particularly to fund an Association whose other line items the community may want to question, is a different matter, and one worth raising at the next budget cycle whether or not anything else changes.

The legal fees line tells a related story. The 2025 budget allocated $750 for legal fees. Actual spending through October 30, 2025 was $1,886, already 151 percent over budget with two months of the year still remaining. The 2026 budget anticipates $2,000, nearly tripling the original 2025 figure. This is not the spending pattern of an Association maintaining a steady-state operation. It is the spending pattern of an Association expanding its scope: drafting new Rules and Regulations, drafting the new fines schedule, and preparing for the disputes those instruments invite. A narrowed Association doing only stormwater and Common Element maintenance would need a small fraction of this, perhaps $200 to $400 per year for routine review of vendor contracts. The remainder is the cost of having an enforcement Board, not the cost of maintaining our community.

This matters because it shows what reform or termination would actually change. The maintenance we actually need is a fraction of the total budget. The rest is the cost of running the apparatus, an apparatus whose stated reason for being is enforcement of restrictions on what owners can do with their own property. The budget is linked in the Documents section. Every owner should look at it.

A fines schedule is not, by itself, a scandal. Most HOAs have one. The reason this combination of moves, the dues increase and the new fines schedule together, has resonated with so many of us is that it crystallizes what our Association has actually become: a body whose primary product is enforcement, paid for by us at a rising rate, governing common property we barely have. That tradeoff was easier to accept when the Association was new and people imagined amenities still to come. Twenty years on, the amenities never came, the restrictions stayed, the enforcement is expanding, and the price keeps going up.

The Declaration anticipated this. Article XVII exists precisely so that a community can decide, at some future point, that the structure is no longer the right one for it. We are at that point worth discussing.