Working out what this actually costs your association

The individual numbers are small enough to be ignored, which is precisely why they get missed in a budget. The multipliers are what matter.

Take a mid-rise Kentucky condominium with two passenger elevators: the annual line moves from $250 to $300. Add a freight elevator and it is $475 to $550. A high-rise on traction equipment feels the change twice, because the per-additional-ten-storeys adder rises from $10 to $25 — two and a half times — on top of the base increase. A thirty-storey traction installation goes from $145 to $200 per unit per year on those figures.

Then there is the re-inspection charge, which is the provision most likely to produce an unbudgeted bill. Today a failed inspection is corrected and re-checked. Under the amendment, each re-inspection costs another full inspection fee. An association whose contractor does not clear a deficiency on the first return visit pays twice, then three times.

That converts a fixed regulatory cost into a variable one that tracks the quality of your maintenance contractor. It is worth saying that out loud to the contractor before the amendment takes effect.

Where this belongs in the budget, and in the reserve study

• Annual inspection fees are an operating expense and should be a named line, not buried in “permits and licences.” Under KRS 381.9197 a Kentucky condominium association must keep financial records detailed enough to comply with KRS 381.9203, and a recurring statutory fee is exactly the sort of item an owner reviewing the accounts expects to find identified.
• Permit fees belong in the modernisation project cost, not the operating budget. A $400 base plus $25 per floor above the eighth is a rounding error against a six-figure modernisation — but it is a real number to include when the board is presenting the project to owners.
• Re-inspection exposure belongs in the maintenance contract. If the contractor's work fails an inspection, the association is paying the state to come back. Whether the contractor bears that is a matter of contract, and most Kentucky elevator maintenance agreements are silent on it.

The wider point about condominium common expenses in Kentucky

Elevators are the clearest example of a category Kentucky boards consistently under-plan for: costs imposed by regulators who are not thinking about associations at all.

Kentucky has no condominium-specific building-safety regime — no structural recertification requirement, no milestone inspection, no statutory reserve study of the kind several states adopted after Surfside. What it has instead is a set of general safety regulations that reach association property through the equipment in it: elevators under 815 KAR Chapter 4, boilers and pressure vessels under 815 KAR Chapter 15 for buildings with central plant, and the Kentucky Building Code at 815 KAR 7:120.

Amendments to the boiler and pressure vessel regulations, including their fee provision at 815 KAR 15:027, are also currently proposed, as is 815 KAR 7:070 on the Kentucky Certified Building Inspector Program. An association with a central boiler plant should be reading that set as well.

A board's options while these are still proposed

Two things, neither of which requires counsel.

First, price it. Count your conveying equipment by category and storeys, apply both columns, and put the difference in front of the board before the budget is adopted. A board that discovers a fee increase when the invoice arrives has already lost the chance to fund it.

Second, engage if it matters to you. Kentucky's administrative regulation process is open to written comment, and the contact person named on the filing for 815 KAR 4:010 is Commissioner Jonathon M. Fuller at the Department of Housing, Buildings and Construction in Frankfort. An elevator-served condominium association is precisely the kind of regulated party these fee schedules are set for, and precisely the kind that never files a comment.

What to watch next

Both regulations are on the LRC's proposed-regulations list, and 815 KAR 4:010 has already been amended at the ARRS Committee. The step to watch is the filing of the final version and its effective date, which will appear on the LRC's regulation pages and in the Kentucky Administrative Register.

Until then the current fee schedule stands, and an association budgeting for 2027 should budget the higher column with a note explaining why.