What a board actually loses from this

An unlitigated statute sounds like good news — no disputes, no exposure. It is closer to the opposite, for three reasons.

You cannot price your risk. When a Kentucky board asks counsel whether its records-inspection practice under KRS 381.795 is adequate, or whether its open-meeting practice satisfies KRS 381.793, the honest answer is that no court has said. Advice in that setting is necessarily conservative, and conservative advice costs money.

The gaps stay open. The Planned Community Act sets no deadline for responding to a records request — the standard is reasonableness. What counts as reasonable is exactly the kind of question courts settle, and no Kentucky court has. The same is true of the condominium standard, which requires records to be “made reasonably available.”

And what is being decided instead is harder to rely on. The Kentucky covenant decisions of 2025 and 2026 are, with a single exception, marked NOT TO BE PUBLISHED — non-binding under the Rules of Appellate Procedure and citable only in limited circumstances. A board can read a consistent line of reasoning across half a dozen recent opinions and still hand its circuit judge nothing binding.

The one exception is Steele v. SRH, LLC, rendered 21 August 2026, which is a chain-of-title case decided on 1994 Supreme Court authority. Even the published decision is not about the statutes.

Why the statutes are not generating cases

Two structural reasons, and one of them is a genuine feature of Kentucky law.

The Planned Community Act applies to planned communities as defined — which expressly excludes condominiums — and its most significant obligations are recordkeeping, budgeting and meeting procedure. Those produce complaints to boards, not lawsuits. The disputes that reach appellate courts are about what an owner may build, rent or store, and those are covenant questions.

The second reason is that Kentucky associations are private corporations, not public agencies. They generate no open-records decisions. A review of every Kentucky Attorney General open-records and open-meetings decision issued in 2025 and 2026 — 743 of them — found not one concerning a condominium, a deed restriction, a restrictive covenant, a common-interest community, or KRS 381.

Where the pressure is instead

The live activity is legislative, and it runs toward narrowing the statutes rather than testing them.

Senate Bill 233, the 2026 session's only bill written specifically about property owner associations, would have exempted planned communities of fourteen or fewer lots and condominiums of fourteen or fewer units from the financial-record and financial-report requirements. It passed the Senate 34-0 and died in the House without a committee referral. The same provisions, at a fifteen-unit threshold, went into the House Committee Substitute to Senate Bill 9, which died in conference on 15 April 2026.

The Community Associations Institute's Kentucky chapter states on its own site that at the state level it is “currently focused on the Kentucky Planned Community Act,” and CAI's national advocacy recap for the first quarter of 2026 lists Kentucky's tracked issues as chicken regulations, short-term rentals, and financial record transparency in associations.

So the Act's first real test may be a legislative one rather than a judicial one — an argument about how far its transparency provisions should reach, decided in Frankfort before any court has said what they currently require.

A Kentucky board's options in the meantime

• Comply with the text, not with practice. Where there is no case law, the statute's words are all a court will have. Reading KRS 381.793 to 381.795 once a year, at the board table, is a genuinely useful hour.
• Document reasonableness. Both the planned-community and condominium standards turn on it. A written records policy with stated response times, applied consistently, is what makes an association's conduct reasonable in fact.
• Do not import other states' law. Kentucky has never enacted the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act. Its condominium statute derives from the 1978 Uniform Condominium Act, and reasoning from UCIOA states does not transfer cleanly.
• Expect the covenant, not the statute, to decide your dispute. That is what Kentucky's courts have been doing, and there is no sign of it changing.

What to watch next

The first appellate decision construing the Planned Community Act, whenever it arrives, will be worth reading closely whatever it is about — because it will be the first. The most likely vehicles are a records-inspection dispute under KRS 381.795 or a lien priority question under KRS 381.799, both of which have obvious commercial stakes and no answer.

On the legislative side, the 2027 Regular Session convenes in January for 30 days. Kentucky abolished bill pre-filing in 2022, so no 2027 bill requests are publicly enumerable and no successor to SB 233 is visible.