Three Arkansas rulings changed how neighbours fight the development next door
Three Arkansas rulings changed how neighbours fight the development next door
2026-09-09 · Arkansas · Courts
Arkansas appellate courts decided three cases between November 2025 and March 2026 that together reshape how a neighbourhood association or a group of owners challenges what is being built next to them — the standard of review, the right forum, and who may be a party.
None of the three is an HOA governance case. All three answer questions Arkansas associations actually face, because an association's most consequential legal problem is often not one of its own members but a bulldozer at the property line.
A conditional use permit is a quasi-judicial act
In MMSC, LLC v. Washington County, decided March 19, 2026, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that a quorum court's decision granting or denying a conditional use permit is quasi-judicial, not legislative, because it applies facts to criteria in an existing ordinance rather than making new law. The circuit court had erred by applying arbitrary-and-capricious review.1
The court reversed and remanded, and vacated the Court of Appeals decision below. It declined to reach the constitutionality of Ark. Code Ann. § 14-17-211, which provides for de novo review, as unnecessary.
The practical effect favours challengers. Arbitrary-and-capricious review is the most deferential standard in administrative law — a permit decision survives it unless essentially unsupportable. Treating the decision as quasi-judicial opens it to a searching form of review.
And there is a second holding embedded in the case caption. The Highland Community Association intervened as a “neighborhood association” alongside resident landowners; its intervention was granted over objection and survived all the way to the Supreme Court. That is a concrete, current data point that an Arkansas community association can participate as a party in a land-use permit appeal affecting its area — a threshold question that otherwise ends these cases before they start.
Flooding claims belong in circuit court
In Taylor v. Ferguson, decided November 13, 2025, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that private tort claims for flooding and property damage allegedly caused by a neighbouring residential development belong in circuit court. Article 7, § 28 of the Arkansas Constitution does not push them into county court merely because runoff incidentally affects a county road; mere “reference to roads, taxes, bridges, etc.” does not invoke county-court jurisdiction. Reversed and remanded.2
That answers a question that had been genuinely costing plaintiffs cases — filing in the wrong court is fatal in a way that has nothing to do with the merits.
And the point was confirmed a second time, the hard way
Centofante v. Ferguson, decided March 11, 2026, is the follow-through, and its procedural history is worth knowing.
The Court of Appeals decided the case once in May 2025. The Supreme Court granted review, vacated that opinion, and remanded in January 2026 with — in the panel's own words — “[n]o additional information, official directive, or guidance.” The panel reached the same result again, this time applying Taylor: a homeowners' coalition's nuisance, negligence, water-diversion and injunction claims against a subdivision developer stay in circuit court, because circuit courts hold general equitable jurisdiction to enjoin the diversion of watercourses and county courts do not.3
Note for anyone researching this: the 2025 opinion was vacated and should be cited only as such.
The defendants in Centofante include the Pulaski County Property Owners Multipurpose Improvement District No. 2021-2 — a reminder that in Arkansas the entity managing a new development's infrastructure may be an improvement district rather than an association, and that it can be a defendant in the same suit as the developer.
What this means for an Arkansas association
Standing is the first question, and the answer is better than it was. An association whose members are affected by a neighbouring development has, in MMSC, a live example of a neighbourhood association litigating as a party through to the Supreme Court. Whether a particular association can intervene still depends on its members' interests and the posture of the case, but the door is demonstrably open.
An association's own authority is also in question. An Arkansas POA is a nonprofit corporation, and its capacity to sue comes from that status and from its articles — not from the community it governs, which has no legal existence of its own. The Attorney General made exactly that point about Hot Springs Village in December 2025: an unincorporated community “has no legal status,” while its incorporated association does.
The review standard is worth the fight. Where an association is opposing a conditional use permit — a commercial use at the edge of a subdivision, a density increase, a use the neighbourhood was not zoned for — MMSC changes what a reviewing court is doing. That is a material improvement in the odds for a challenger, and it is worth raising expressly.
Drainage is the recurring Arkansas fight. Two Supreme Court-level answers in five months on where these claims are heard tells you how common they are. New subdivision construction upstream, altered runoff downstream, and an association whose common area — detention ponds, greenbelts, streets — takes the water. The forum question is now settled: circuit court.
But public permission is not private permission. An association resisting a neighbouring development should remember the corollary the Court of Appeals confirmed in April 2026: a city's rezoning does not release a private covenant. Where the land in question is itself inside a covenanted subdivision, the recorded instrument is a separate and independent constraint, enforceable regardless of what the city or county allowed. That is often the stronger argument, and it does not require intervening in anyone's permit appeal.
The practical sequence
For an Arkansas board facing a development next door, the order of operations these cases suggest is:
- Check the recorded instruments first — the neighbouring parcel's chain of title, and whether a bill of assurance reaches it. A covenant violation is enforceable in equity and does not depend on any public process.
- Appear in the public process anyway, and make the record. A conditional use permit decision is now reviewable as a quasi-judicial act, and what was said at the hearing is what a court will review.
- If the injury is water, sue in circuit court, and plead nuisance, negligence and diversion with an injunction. Forum is no longer a live risk.
- Confirm the association's own capacity to bring or join the action before filing, including whether its corporate status is current with the Secretary of State.
What to watch next
How circuit courts apply the quasi-judicial classification in practice — what a de novo or quasi-judicial review of a conditional use permit actually looks like on remand is not yet answered. And whether Centofante produces a merits ruling on developer liability for altered drainage, which is the question everyone downstream of Arkansas's fastest-growing subdivisions is actually asking.
Related Arkansas HOA Topics
- MMSC, LLC v. Washington County, 2026 Ark. 56 (Ark. Mar. 19, 2026) (No. CV-21-282) — slip opinion, full text ↩
- Taylor v. Ferguson, 2025 Ark. 180, 722 S.W.3d 498 (Ark. Nov. 13, 2025) (No. CV-24-710) — slip opinion, full text ↩
- Centofante v. Ferguson, 2026 Ark. App. 172 (Ark. Ct. App. Mar. 11, 2026) (No. CV-23-840) — slip opinion, full text ↩
- Ark. Att'y Gen. Op. No. 2025-052 (Dec. 4, 2025) — an unincorporated community has no legal status; its nonprofit association does ↩
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