Beyond that: about 10% on repair responsibility, about 10% on records access, 44 on budgets and assessments, 33 on rules, enforcement and fines, and 12 on complaint and dispute-resolution processes. Nearly a quarter resisted categorisation — parking assignment, noise and odours, pest infestation, common-area temperature, storage allocation, alleged mismanagement.

A number of governance inquiries required interpreting a specific declaration or set of bylaws. Those inquirers were advised to read their governing documents carefully.

The capacity line, repeated for a second year

The report says it plainly: the Ombudsperson role is not a full-time position, the Ombudsperson has no additional staff, and approximately twenty percent of their time is devoted to serving as Ombudsperson. Adrienne M. Levatino, appointed January 1, 2017, simultaneously serves as Associate General Counsel of the Division of Real Estate.

So Illinois's entire state-level advisory apparatus for roughly 20,000 community associations is about one day a week of one lawyer's time.

What the numbers actually show

The 85/11 split is the finding. Owners contact the Office; boards essentially do not. An office chartered to help “unit owners, condominium, and common interest community associations and their respective boards” understand their rights and obligations is being used almost entirely by one side.

Read alongside the 20% governance share, the picture is consistent across both years: owners who cannot get meetings held, minutes produced, or documents released, calling a state office that cannot compel anything. The Office expressly has no power to enforce any law or regulation.

Note also what the volume is not. 378 inquiries a year across 20,000 associations is not evidence that Illinois associations are largely well run; it is evidence that almost nobody knows the Office exists.

Still no statutory recommendations

For a second consecutive year the Office declined to recommend statutory change, saying the anecdotal base remains limited — while noting that owners and boards “would benefit from more effective, transparent, and timely communication” and “greater civility.”

That reticence is defensible on the data and it has a cost. The 2026 session produced a bill to abolish this Office and replace it with a registry and fining authority, five bills to give a state body power over boards, and a task force resolution — all of which died, and none of which the Office weighed in on with recommendations of its own.

The one duty boards must not miss

Under Section 35 of the Act, every association except a common interest community association exempt from CICAA must adopt a written policy for resolving unit-owner complaints and make it available to owners on request. IDFPR publishes a sample Association Complaint Procedure and Complaint Form.

Most Illinois boards do not know this obligation exists. It costs an hour to satisfy.

What to watch next

The Office survives to January 1, 2029 under P.A. 104-0377, which took effect August 15, 2025 and pushed the repeal date out from January 1, 2026. This is the first report written under that extension. Whether the Office ever makes statutory recommendations is the thing to watch — it would materially change the 2027 legislative picture.