Why this cuts the opposite way from the other 2026 tax-sale case

Alabama's tax-title provisions produced two association decisions three months apart, and reading them together is more useful than reading either alone.

In Stoney Point Landing Homeowners Association v. Lee, No. CL-2025-0881 (Ala. Civ. App. June 12, 2026), an HOA won on the same statutory cluster. Two tax purchasers had taken deeds to a subdivision lot and neither took possession or sued within three years, so under § 40-10-82 title may have reverted to the original owners — who therefore may still owe the association's assessment. The tax purchasers' inaction worked for the association.

In Ono Island, an association lost. There the association was the one trying to recover a parcel, and the passage of time worked against it.

The pattern is not a contradiction. Alabama's tax-title scheme rewards whoever is not required to act and penalises whoever is. An association pursuing a delinquent owner benefits when a tax purchaser sits on a deed. An association trying to recover land for itself is the party that must act, and the clock runs against it.

What it changes for boards and managers

Common-area parcels can go to a tax sale, and the association may not notice. Odd fragments — a dredged spoil island, a detention basin, a stub of right-of-way, a remnant left after a plat revision — are exactly the parcels that end up assessed to nobody in particular and sold for a small delinquency. The association discovers it years later, when someone wants to build on it.

The 20-year clock is unforgiving in a way limitations periods are not. Boards turn over; institutional memory in a volunteer organisation is short; a title problem created in 1995 surfaces under a board that had nothing to do with it. The rule of repose does not care.

The practical control is a periodic title and tax audit of association-owned land. Most associations can list their common areas from the declaration and plat. Fewer can confirm that each parcel is currently assessed to the association and that the taxes are paid. That check costs little and is the only thing that reliably prevents this category of problem.

Dredged, filled and made land carries extra risk. Ground created by permitted works — canal spoil, fill, accreted land — often has an ambiguous assessment history precisely because it did not exist when the original plat was drawn.

A note on what this decision is not

This is a decision about redemption of tax-sold land. It says nothing about an association's assessment lien, its foreclosure powers, or its authority over common elements it does hold. It is a property-title case that happens to have an association on one side.

It is also fact-specific in the way title cases are. The 1981 permit, the 1995 sale, and the intertidal character of the parcel are all part of why it came out as it did.

What to watch next

The case has now been to the Supreme Court of Alabama once and to the Court of Civil Appeals twice. We have located no further history after the March 20, 2026 decision.

The slip opinion carries the standard notice that it is “subject to formal revision before publication in the advance sheets of Southern Reporter.”