A judgment against your Maine association is not a lien on the units
A judgment against your Maine association is not a lien on the units
2026-09-12 · Maine · Courts
What happened. On 25 February 2025 the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, decided Maples v. Compass Harbor Village Condominium Association, 2025 ME 19 — and answered a question the Maine Condominium Act had left untested since 1981: what a money judgment against a condominium association actually reaches.1
The answer is narrower than most creditors assume. A judgment against the association is not self-executing against the units. It has to be run through the District Court's disclosure procedure, and the Superior Court has no jurisdiction to do it instead.
The dispute, and why it reached a fourth appeal
This is the long-running Bar Harbor litigation. A 2019 judgment out of the Business and Consumer Docket — affirmed in Maples v. Compass Harbor Village Condominium Ass'n, 2020 ME 44 — awarded Charles Maples $134,900 and Kathy Brown $106,801 against the association and its declarant LLC for what the trial court found to be “longstanding and pervasive mismanagement and misconduct”. That judgment also barred the association from assessing any unit owner to pay it.
Collection then failed. The declarant LLC's units were mortgaged, a bank foreclosed, and the judgment creditors' lien was extinguished with them. Maples and Brown responded by suing the association, the LLC and the seven remaining unit owners directly in Superior Court, seeking to reach the units themselves under 33 M.R.S. § 1603-117(a). The case was transferred to the Business and Consumer Docket and dismissed.
What the Law Court held
The panel — Stanfill, C.J., Mead, Horton, Connors, Lawrence and Douglas, JJ., with Horton, J., writing — was unanimous, and reached the jurisdictional problem on its own motion:
“the provision requires the judgment creditor to proceed by means of the disclosure procedure over which the District Court has exclusive jurisdiction, not by means of an action brought in the Superior Court… Because the transfer of the action to the Business and Consumer Docket could not cure the Superior Court's lack of jurisdiction, we affirm the court's dismissal of the claims.”
The decisive move is a definitional one. Section 1603-117 speaks of a “lien order”, and the court read that term against the general execution statutes:
“‘[L]ien order’ plainly means a turnover order or order of sale that can be perfected as a lien on the property described in the order… The judgment lien that Maples and Brown have obtained under 14 M.R.S. § 4651-A is not a lien order.”
What it changes for boards, creditors and managers
The practical effect runs in both directions, and it is worth being precise about which side of it you are on.
If your association is the judgment debtor, the judgment does not become an encumbrance on the units by operation of law. A creditor who wants to reach unit-level value must open a disclosure proceeding under 14 M.R.S. §§ 3120–3138 and obtain a turnover order or order of sale under § 3131 — and only the District Court can issue one. The court was explicit that disclosure is not an exclusive remedy in general, but that it cannot be cherry-picked:
“[T]he disclosure procedure is not exclusive [as a general matter], [but] it cannot be employed piecemeal in the Superior Court—only the District Court has jurisdiction to issue turnover orders and orders of sale pursuant to 14 M.R.S. § 3131.”
If your association is the judgment creditor — pursuing a developer, a contractor or a former manager — the same constraint applies to you. Filing in the Superior Court, or transferring into the Business and Consumer Docket, does not fix a jurisdictional defect. The dismissal here was affirmed after years of litigation for exactly that reason.
The assessment trap behind this case
Read the 2019 judgment and this one together and a structural problem appears. A Maine condominium association's only real source of money is assessments. Where a court both enters a money judgment against the association and bars it from assessing owners to satisfy that judgment, the judgment has no ordinary route to payment. Section 1603-117 is what remains — and this decision narrows how it operates.
For boards, the lesson is about sequencing rather than strategy. A claim of the kind litigated here arose during declarant control; by the time it was reduced to judgment, the entity with assets had been foreclosed out. Maine has an indemnification provision aimed at declarant-period wrongs at 33 M.R.S. § 1603-111, and the Law Court has since held, in The Village at Ocean's End, 2025 ME 85, that it does not reach every fact pattern.
One footnote worth reading
At footnote 3 the court flagged, without deciding, that an attorney-fee award forming part of an underlying judgment may not be enforceable where the fees were incurred in a matter other than the litigation in which enforcement is sought. The Law Court returned to fee scrutiny the following year in Tidewater Loft Condominium Ass'n v. Moskal-Kanz, 2026 ME 46, questioning a $36,962.09 award that appeared to bundle in a separate Maine Human Rights Commission proceeding.
What to watch next
Maine has no intermediate appellate court, so a § 1603-117 question goes from the Superior Court or the Business and Consumer Docket straight to the Law Court. There is now one controlling construction of the provision's procedural mechanics and no published decision on what a disclosure proceeding against unit owners looks like in practice — who must be served, how a turnover order is allocated among units, and how it interacts with the association's own assessment lien under § 1603-116. That is the next gap a case will fill.
Related Maine HOA Topics
Stay on top of Maine HOA law
Every week: new Maine legislation, court rulings, and regulatory developments affecting condos, planned communities, and property managers. Free.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.