Why the repealed-chapter example is worse than a typo

Chapter 514A was Hawaii’s original condominium statute. It was repealed in its entirety, effective January 1, 2019, and HRS § 514B-22 — which had governed applicability to older projects — was repealed with it.

The operative scope provision is § 514B-21: the chapter “applies to all condominiums created within this State,” and “Amendments to this chapter apply to all condominiums, regardless of when the amendment is adopted.” Subsection (b) supplies the translation for old documents: “condominium property regime” and “horizontal property regime” correspond to “condominium,” “apartment” to “unit,” “association of apartment owners” to “association.”

So a tool that cites 514A is not slightly out of date — it is applying a statute that has not existed for seven years to a building whose declaration probably still uses its vocabulary, which is exactly the situation in which the error is hardest to spot.

There is a further wrinkle that makes this error easy to make honestly: until March 26, 2026 the state’s own administrative rules, HAR ch. 16-107, were still captioned as rules relating to horizontal property regimes under chapter 514A. The Commission repealed them and adopted chapters 16-119.1 through 16-119.8 in their place. A tool trained on material from before that date has seen a lot of 514A.

The reserve-study passage is the sharpest paragraph in the guidance

“A certified reserve specialist will refuse to complete a reserve study report until the omitted information is provided. An AI has no similar hesitation providing a report on needed repairs based on incomplete data.”

That is a precise description of the failure mode, and it lands at the worst possible moment. Reserve funding is now policed on two tracks — HAR ch. 16-119.6 with its thirty-year floor and formula-based definitions, and the secondary mortgage market’s Full Review reserve test. Neither accepts a generated estimate as a reserve study.

The transparency point, and where it bites

The Branch wants owners told when the board uses AI in decision-making, and says responsibility for decisions rests with the board regardless.

That fits HRS § 514B-106(a), which puts a fiduciary duty on officers and board members measured by the standard of care owed by a director of a ch. 414D nonprofit corporation. Delegating research to a tool no more delegates that duty than delegating it to a managing agent does.

And the confidentiality warning has a specific Hawaii edge. Association records are not free-floating: § 514B-152 requires records to be stored “on the island on which the association’s project is located,” and § 514B-153 permits release of the membership list only on a duly executed and acknowledged affidavit that it will be used only for association purposes and “shall not be… furnished to anyone else for any other purpose.” Uploading a delinquency report or a membership list to a third-party service is worth examining against those provisions before anyone does it.

A workable policy, in four lines

• No owner-identifying data, ever — no delinquency lists, no membership lists, no violation files, no legal advice received.
• Every statutory citation gets checked against the official HRS before it reaches a board packet. The section text is free at the Legislature’s own site.
• No generated output substitutes for a professional deliverable — reserve study, audit, engineering report, legal opinion.
• Disclose use in the minutes where it informed a decision.

What to watch

Whether the Commission moves from bulletin guidance to a rule. The March 2026 piece is explicitly non-binding — but it is on the record, and a board whose process is later questioned will be measured against a warning the regulator published.