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.”

1. Maples v. Compass Harbor Village Condominium Ass'n, 2025 ME 19 (Docket BCD-24-53, decided 25 February 2025) — official opinion PDF, Maine Judicial Branch ↩