Indiana court: a board that skips meetings still gets paid
Indiana court: a board that skips meetings still gets paid
2026-09-10 · Indiana · Courts
What happened. An Indiana homeowner stopped paying his assessments because his association had stopped doing almost everything else — no annual meetings, no director elections, no budget, for years. On 12 March 2025 the Indiana Court of Appeals told him that was not a defence, and affirmed a judgment against him of roughly $39,000 plus attorney fees.1
The decision is Andy Sandoval and The Paradise Properties Land Trust v. Willow Lake Estates Home Owners Association, Inc., No. 24A-MF-309. It is a published opinion, which means it binds Indiana trial courts.
The argument the owner made
Sandoval's position had a certain logic to it. The association, he said, had not held the annual meetings its own bylaws required, had not put directors up for election, and had not prepared an annual budget — so on what authority was it levying anything at all? He treated the assessments as void and withheld payment. The dispute ran roughly seven years and through two lawsuits before it reached the Court of Appeals.
Why it failed
The court answered in two moves, and the first one is the one most Indiana readers will not see coming.
Move one: the Homeowners Association Act did not apply. Willow Lake Estates was formed in 1989. Indiana's HOA article, IC 32-25.5, reaches associations formed after 30 June 2009 unless an older association affirmatively elects into it — and this one never had. So the budget and meeting duties Sandoval was pointing to were not, for this association, statutory duties at all.
Move two: the Nonprofit Corporation Act forecloses the remedy anyway. Like most Indiana associations, Willow Lake is a nonprofit corporation, and IC 23-17-10-1(i)(1) is explicit that the failure to hold a meeting on time does not:
“[a]ffect the validity of any corporate action.”
The court then looked at the association's own covenants and bylaws and found nothing making an annual meeting, or an adopted budget, a condition precedent to levying assessments. Its conclusion is one sentence long:
“The HOA's failure to hold annual meetings and prepare a budget, thus, does not excuse Sandoval from paying periodic assessments.”
Judgment for the association was affirmed, as was the denial of Sandoval's motion to correct error.
What the court did not say
This is not a decision that blesses a dormant board, and reading it that way would be a mistake. The panel went out of its way to record that it “disapprove[d] of the HOA's conduct.” What it held is narrower and more specific: non-payment is the wrong remedy, not that there is no wrong.
The distinction matters because the opinion also names the right remedy. Under IC 23-17-10-3, a member of a nonprofit corporation may petition a court to compel a meeting the corporation has failed to hold. That is a real, available, and comparatively cheap route, and Sandoval's problem was in part that he did not take it before he stopped paying.
What this means for an owner
- Withholding assessments is a losing play in Indiana. The obligation to pay and the board's governance obligations are separate covenants, and breach of the second does not suspend the first. Withholding converts a governance grievance into a collection action the owner will lose, with fee exposure attached.
- Fee-shifting turns a small dispute into a large one. The judgment here was about $39,000 plus fees on what began as unpaid periodic assessments. Indiana declarations routinely make the prevailing party's fees recoverable.
- Petition first. If the board will not meet, IC 23-17-10-3 is the lever. Using it also builds the record that a later fiduciary claim would need.
What this means for a board
The temptation is to read Sandoval as permission to let governance slide, since the assessments are collectible regardless. Two things cut against that.
First, the ruling turned on this association's particular governing documents. The court looked for language making meetings or a budget a condition precedent to assessing, and did not find any. A declaration drafted differently produces a different case. Whether a board's own documents are silent on the point is settled by reading them.
Second, and more consequentially, Sandoval describes a legal landscape that changed on 1 July 2026. The 2026 General Assembly enacted a set of amendments to IC 32-25.5 imposing express meeting-notice, fee, fine-schedule and amendment-threshold rules. Those changes do not retroactively rescue Sandoval's argument — but for an association that is within the article's reach, the statutory duties are now considerably more concrete than they were when Willow Lake Estates was litigating.
The structural point worth remembering
The single most useful thing in this opinion is not its holding. It is the reminder that Indiana has two tiers of homeowners associations, and the tier an association sits in decides which statute governs it. An association formed before 1 July 2009 that never elected into IC 32-25.5 is governed by its own recorded documents and the Nonprofit Corporation Act, and very little else. A great many Indiana subdivisions are in exactly that position, and their members are frequently arguing from a statute that does not apply to them.
What to watch
Whether transfer to the Indiana Supreme Court was sought is not stated in the opinion, and we have not independently confirmed the transfer docket. Readers relying on Sandoval for a live matter should check its current status before citing it.
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