The arithmetic facing a Kansas board this month

Calculate the target. Take the 2027 budgeted assessment income and multiply by 0.15. That is the reserve line that keeps the project reviewable. Compare it against what the draft budget currently allocates.

Decide how to close the gap, and be honest about the options. There are three, and only three: raise assessments, cut operating expense, or accept that units in the project may not be conventionally financeable. Boards reliably spend a meeting looking for a fourth.

Watch the denominator. The requirement is a percentage of assessment income, so raising assessments raises the target too. An association increasing assessments to fund reserves must increase the reserve line proportionally to stay at 15 percent, which is not intuitive and catches boards mid-cycle.

Re-read the reserve study you already have. If it was written to support baseline funding, the number the board has been budgeting against is no longer the number that counts. Ask the reserve provider to state the highest recommended allocation explicitly, in writing, in a form a lender can read.

The Kansas timing problem

These dates fall badly for Kansas. Budgets for 2027 are being adopted now, in the autumn of 2026, and the 15 percent requirement bites on January 4, 2027 — a matter of days into the year the budget covers. A board that adopts a 10 percent reserve line this month has locked in a full year of unfinanceability unless it reopens the budget.

Kansas gives boards a route to do that. K.S.A. 58-4620(a) lets the board propose and adopt a budget with at least ten days' notice of the meeting and a copy of the proposal made available to any owner who requests it, and owners “must be given a reasonable opportunity to comment on the proposal prior to the board taking action.” A budget amendment follows the same procedure. Ten days is short enough that a board discovering this in November can still fix it.

What this does to a Kansas community's finances

Two effects, pulling against each other.

The first is a real assessment increase for owners on fixed incomes, arriving in the same year that Kansas property insurance has repriced twice and that the state's storm claims doubled in two years. That is a hard sell at an annual meeting, and burying it in a line item does not make it an easier one.

The second is that underfunded reserves are the mechanism by which Kansas condominium owners get special assessments they cannot pay. The requirement is imposed by a mortgage underwriter rather than by the Legislature, but it is not arbitrary — it is the same conclusion Kansas has simply never drawn for itself.

What to watch next

Watch whether Freddie Mac's requirements stay aligned. The two have been moving in step through 2026, and a divergence would mean a project financeable through one and not the other.

Watch, too, for reserve requirements to appear in a Kansas bill. The Legislature has never proposed one. If Kansas condominium sales begin failing on reserve adequacy in visible numbers, that is the pressure that historically produces a statute.