The fiscal note is the story

The Office of the Controller General filed a fiscal note dated June 11, 2026 — the day after introduction.² The Department of Justice estimated the bill required 3.0 FTE Legal Assistant III positions. The costs:

• FY2027: $21,900 one-time plus $145,856 recurring (six months of personnel funding)
• FY2028: $292,617
• FY2029: $298,374

The Controller General's own oversight cost was recorded as “indeterminable at this time.”

A roughly $300,000 recurring general-fund request, introduced 20 days before adjournment, in the same weeks the FY2027 budget was being closed out, went nowhere. That is not mysterious. It is worth noting for contrast that HB 469 received more procedural investment than SB 352, the reserve-and-inspection bill filed two weeks later, whose fiscal note was marked “Not Required” — and both died in their first committee.

What the office actually handles, and why deputies were proposed

The scale of the mismatch is documented in the Ombudsperson's own statutory report. In calendar 2024 the office received 84 formal complaints (36 statutorily complete, 48 incomplete but tracked), resolved 82, and carried 8 into 2025. It fielded 456 formal email inquiries requiring research, 56 informal inquiries, and 26,775 general emails. It made 12 referrals to the Court of Common Pleas community mediation programme — one of which bundled seven complaints from a single community. It provided election services for exactly two communities all year.³

The office also estimates there are more than 3,000 common interest communities in Delaware, and cannot reliably identify which ones they are.

Two Advisory Council seats remain unfilled. The Council met five times in 2024, all by Zoom, with public attendance of 38 to 70 per meeting against 0 to 6 before the pandemic.

What the ADR-fee provision would have changed

This is the part worth flagging for boards and owners, because it is a structural change dressed as a funding mechanism.

Delaware's CIC dispute resolution is currently free to the parties. HB 469 would have let the office charge fees for mediation, election monitoring and vote counting, and would have directed those fees into the fund that pays the deputies. That makes the service partly self-financing — and it also puts a price on the one route a Delaware homeowner has that does not require a lawyer and the Court of Chancery.

The bill set no fee schedule and no waiver provision. Whether that would have improved access or narrowed it is genuinely unresolved on the text, and the bill died before anyone had to answer it. Our Delaware dispute resolution page sets out what the process currently costs and what it can and cannot compel.

One structural fact that explains a lot

The Ombudsperson's office operates under statute alone. We searched the Delaware Administrative Code for “Ombudsperson” and found zero results; a search of the Register of Regulations for “common interest community” also returns zero results across all volumes.⁴

Delaware's internal dispute resolution process, its fair election procedure and its complaint process are all creatures of 29 Del. C. §§ 2540–2546 plus office-issued forms — not codified regulation. There is no agency rulemaking to expand the office incrementally. Everything it does or does not do goes through the General Assembly, which is exactly why a bill dying in committee matters here more than it would elsewhere.

What to watch next

Reintroduction would have to happen in the 154th General Assembly, from January 2027. As a spending bill it competes with the FY2028 budget cycle. Nothing is pre-filed — the legislature's database returns zero bills for the 154th General Assembly — and no legislator has announced an intention to refile it.

The document most likely to move this is the Ombudsperson's 2025 annual report, due around December 2026. The office's recommendations are statutorily required to go to the Governor, the Attorney General, the General Assembly and the Chief Justice, and several have been restated unchanged since 2022.