Connecticut court: adding later unpaid years to an association lien case does not wipe out the default
Connecticut court: adding later unpaid years to an association lien case does not wipe out the default
2026-09-09 · Connecticut · Courts
An association that amends its foreclosure complaint to add three more years of the same unpaid charges does not thereby hand the defaulted owner a fresh start, the Connecticut Appellate Court held in Birch Groves Assn., Inc. v. Jordon, released July 1, 2025.1
It is a procedural decision rather than a doctrinal one, and that is exactly why it is useful: default practice is where most Connecticut association collection cases are actually decided.
What happened
Birch Groves Association, Inc. is a homeowners association in New Milford that maintains the community water system. It foreclosed water liens on two lots for unpaid annual water-use fees for 2018 and 2019, later amending to add 2020.
The owner was defaulted for failure to plead. She let that stand for nearly three years before moving to set it aside, arguing in part that the association's water bills were arbitrary and capricious because she was not a member of the association.
The panel — Cradle, C.J., Elgo and Suarez, Js., in an opinion by Chief Judge Cradle — affirmed, remanding only to set new sale dates. AC 47213, 233 Conn. App. 488.1
The three holdings
An amendment adding more of the same does not undo a default. The amended complaint “did not make any substantial changes to the cause of action or interject new material issues into the case,” so the existing default survived it.
Absence of prejudice is not good cause. Under Practice Book § 17-42 the movant must show good cause. The motion “did not allege any facts demonstrating that good cause existed to set aside the default that she failed to address for nearly three years.”
An inadequately briefed challenge is unreviewable. The attack on the association's affidavit of debt was not briefed sufficiently to be considered.
An important limit on how far this reaches
This is a water-lien case, not a common-charge case. The opinion does not cite the Common Interest Ownership Act at all: the liens arise from the association's water system charges, not from § 47-258 assessments.
Its value is therefore in the procedure — the default rules under Practice Book §§ 17-32, 17-33 and 17-42, the amendment rules under § 10-60, and § 49-72 — rather than in anything specific to CIOA. Anyone citing it for a proposition about assessment liens is over-reading it.
What it means in practice
For associations: the amendment question has an answer. Collection cases routinely outrun the arrears they were filed on. An association that amends to capture later unpaid periods now has appellate authority that doing so does not surrender the procedural ground it has already won, provided the amendment does not change the cause of action or introduce new material issues.
The qualifier matters. An amendment that adds a genuinely different claim — converting a charges case into one that also seeks fines, say — is a different proposition, and the reasoning here would not obviously carry.
For owners: delay is the thing that decides it. The court did not say the owner's substantive complaint was worthless. It said she waited almost three years and then offered no facts amounting to good cause. Nearly every element of the outcome traces to that.
The affidavit of debt survived by default, not by endorsement. The challenge failed because it was inadequately briefed. That is not a holding that an association's affidavit of debt is unassailable, and a properly developed challenge to the calculation of arrears, late fees and costs remains open.
Where it sits in the Connecticut collections picture
Read alongside Akinyele v. Huntington Condominium Assn., decided ten months later, the two decisions describe a system with a clear shape. The association's lien action is designed to move quickly and resist interruption — an owner cannot raise service grievances inside it, and procedural lapses are not readily forgiven. The owner's remedy is a separate action afterwards, which Akinyele confirms res judicata will not bar.
That is a coherent allocation, but it depends on the owner actually bringing the second case. An owner who defaults in the foreclosure and never files anything gets the worst of both halves.
What to watch next
Two related questions were left undecided. The first is what evidentiary weight an association's affidavit of debt carries when a properly briefed challenge is mounted. The second is the owner's membership argument — she contended she was not a member of the association billing her, which is a real question about the source of the obligation. The court never reached it, because the default disposed of the case.
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