Why this lands on Colorado associations specifically

Every element of that list has a direct analogue in community association operations.

Incident reports. Managers open them for slips on icy walkways, pool incidents, water intrusion, garage door failures and altercations. If the report exists partly to prepare for possible legal action — which is usually why it exists — it is evidence that the association anticipated a claim.

Persistent complaints. A resident who emails the board monthly about a leaking window, a mould smell or a broken handrail is generating exactly the record the division relied on.

An owner's own preservation efforts. Photographs, moisture readings, an independent inspection report. When an owner starts documenting, that itself is the signal.

Put together: the moment an incident report is opened on a complaint an owner is actively documenting, a court will expect the thing preserved.

What “the thing” usually is

In an association, the items most often discarded before anyone thinks about litigation are physical:

the failed component itself — the section of pipe, the window unit, the handrail, the roof shingles removed during a repair; contractor debris and removed materials; the damaged carpet or drywall cut out during remediation; a resident's property removed from a common element or a storage area; and the electronic record — camera footage on an automatic overwrite cycle, access-control logs, and the manager's own text messages.

Camera footage deserves its own line. Most systems overwrite on a fixed cycle measured in days or weeks. An association that receives a complaint about an incident captured on camera, opens an incident report, and then lets the cycle run has destroyed relevant evidence through inaction — which is still destruction.

The practical protocol

Tie a preservation step to the incident report form itself. The cheapest fix available is a line on the form: evidence preserved — what, where, by whom, date. If the form triggers the duty, let it also trigger the response.

Photograph and retain the failed component before it goes in a skip. A labelled section of pipe in a storage room costs nothing and answers a causation question years later.

Export camera footage on the day, not at the end of the week. And record that you did.

Tell the contractor in writing not to dispose of removed materials where a complaint is live. Repair contracts routinely give the contractor debris removal as a matter of course.

And instruct the manager not to clear a resident's property from a common element or storage area while a dispute about it is running — which is precisely what produced the sanction in this case.

Where this sits alongside the rest of the period's rulings

Preservation discipline is not an abstract virtue in Colorado right now. Three other rulings from the same window show what happens to associations whose records do not hold up.

A condominium association's public adjuster file became the insurer's weapon in a hail claim: in Prairie Walk Condominium Association v. The American Insurance Company, the insurer obtained nearly 75,000 pages from the association's adjuster and later a contractor proposal totalling nearly $1.7 million — sitting behind demand estimates of $9.9 million to $14 million — and used it to add counterclaims. The association's Rule 11 sanctions motion then failed on the safe harbour, because the insurer corrected its filings within the 21-day window rather than withdrawing them, which the rule expressly permits.

And in New Hampshire Insurance Co. v. TSG Ski & Golf, LLC, a Colorado owners' association lost both defence and indemnity because its directors testified they knew a $15.5 million assessment demand ignored payments already credited. The exposure was established by what the directors knew and could not document otherwise.

The common lesson is unglamorous: in Colorado association litigation this period, the association's own records — incident reports, adjuster files, board minutes, reconciliations — have decided more cases than any point of CCIOA construction. A twenty-month sweep of published Colorado appellate opinions found none construing CCIOA's assessment-lien or records provisions at all.

What would change the answer

Litigation that is genuinely a “distant possibility” rather than imminent, likely or reasonably anticipated does not trigger the duty — the Court said so expressly, and a single unremarkable maintenance request is not a lawsuit in prospect. Evidence that is not relevant to the anticipated claim is outside the rule. And a routine document-retention schedule applied before any complaint arises is not spoliation. The problem is the destruction that happens after the report is opened.