Georgia created an HOA appreciation day and killed the HOA transparency resolution
Georgia created an HOA appreciation day and killed the HOA transparency resolution
2026-09-10 · Georgia · Legislation · Did not pass
What happened. In a single session, the Georgia General Assembly adopted a ceremonial day honouring homeowners, condominium and property owners' associations — and declined to adopt a resolution merely urging those associations to be transparent.
Both facts come from the chamber's own Session Final composite status report.1
Adopted
SR 595 — “HOA, COA, and POA Day; recognize and celebrate” — was introduced and adopted in the Senate on the same day, 27 January 2026.
Its House counterpart, HR 1138 — “First HOA, COA, and POA Day at the capitol; recognize” — was introduced and taken up on 28 January 2026.
Died
HR 1751 — “Condominium and property owners' associations; provide transparency; urge” — was referred to House Special Rules, read first time 19 March 2026 and second time 20 March 2026. Never reported, never adopted.
A resolution of this kind has no legal effect whatever. It urges. It was not adopted.
Two further resolutions in the same field also died: HR 1675, to create a House Study Committee on Community Associations, and SR 445, urging the Department of Community Affairs to investigate abusive HOA practices.
The same week, in the same building
The timing is what makes this more than a curiosity. The HOA appreciation resolutions moved on 27 and 28 January 2026. That is precisely the week that HB 1035 and HB 1036 were filed — the bills that would have abolished association foreclosure and let homeowners dissolve their associations by petition and vote.
Both things were true in the Georgia Capitol in the same week: a celebration of community associations, and the filing of the most aggressive anti-association legislation in the state's history.
What was happening outside the chamber
About a month later, homeowners packed the Capitol for an HOA advocacy day. Reporting from that period cited survey data on Georgia homeowners in association disputes: Atlanta News First's survey of more than 130 homeowners found 63% facing fines and fees averaging around $9,000, 41% in litigation with their association, and 30% carrying liens.2
A separate account of the advocacy-day period put the figures at roughly 63% owing fines averaging over $8,000.3 The surveys are self-selecting — homeowners in dispute are the ones who answer a survey about disputes — and should be read as evidence of the intensity of the grievance rather than as a population estimate.
How to read this fairly
The temptation is to treat SR 595 as tone-deafness. That reading is available, and homeowners in the middle of a lien dispute will take it. But it is not the only reading, and a Georgia board member would put a different case.
Community associations in Georgia are run overwhelmingly by unpaid volunteers. They approve budgets, manage contractors, maintain stormwater infrastructure the county will not adopt, and absorb the anger of neighbours over fence colours. A ceremonial day recognising that work is not, on its face, an endorsement of the conduct that produced SB 406.
Both resolutions can be sincere. What is harder to defend is the asymmetry: the chamber found floor time to celebrate associations and did not find floor time for a non-binding resolution urging them to be transparent, in a session where transparency was the animating grievance.
What ceremonial resolutions actually indicate
For readers tracking Georgia legislation, resolutions of this kind are a genuine signal — not of policy, but of access.
A same-day introduce-and-adopt resolution recognising an industry at the Capitol generally reflects an organised presence: somebody arranged the day, somebody asked a member to carry it. The Community Associations Institute held its inaugural Georgia Legislative Capitol Day on 26 February 2026, with over 100 members present.
So January's resolution and February's Capitol Day are of a piece: a trade body building a statehouse presence in Georgia for the first time in an organised way. It did not work — the bill passed 155-10 and the veto request failed — but it explains why the ceremonial resolution existed at all, and why the homeowner side had none.
The transparency the resolution asked for, and what arrived instead
HR 1751 urged transparency. It failed. But transparency provisions did become law, in the bill that was moving at the same time.
From 1 January 2027, § 43-17A-7(1) gives Georgia owners a right to inspect and copy association records, with the accounting records specified as “the finalized balance sheet, budget, profit and loss statements, and bank statements for the past three years.” Section 43-17A-2(a)(3) puts the association's governing documents — including board-adopted rules — into a state filing. Section 43-17A-2(f) makes records on finances, assessments, fines, fees, liens and foreclosures subject to examination by the Secretary of State.
That is considerably more than a resolution urging transparency would have produced. The resolution's failure cost Georgia homeowners nothing substantive.
What it did cost
One thing, and it is the same gap the failed study-committee resolutions left. A resolution urging transparency, had it been adopted, would have created a small piece of legislative history about what the General Assembly understood transparency to require — at the moment it was enacting a records right that is expressly made “subject to… the governing documents” while simultaneously naming four specific documents and a three-year window.
That tension is going to be litigated. There is nothing in the record to help resolve it.
What to watch next
Whether the first HOA, COA and POA Day at the Georgia Capitol happens again in 2027 — and if so, whether the homeowner-side groups that won the legislative fight organise a competing one. The WATCH Project and the HOA Alliance both have a claim to a day at the Capitol now, and neither has announced anything for 2027.
Related Georgia HOA Topics
- 2026 Composite Status Report, Session Final, Georgia House of Representatives (14 May 2026) ↩
- “‘Something's going to pass’ — Georgia senators vow HOA reform” — Atlanta News First, 14 January 2026 ↩
- Hoodline on Georgia HOA advocacy day and House passage, March 2026 ↩
- Senate Bill 406, as passed (26 LC 49 2879S) — signed copy, Office of the Governor ↩
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