Why the whole judgment went, not just the counterclaim

This is the part with teeth. A court that finds a procedural defect in one count will often sever it and leave the rest standing. Here it did not:

“[W]e cannot say with certainty that the foreclosure is factually and legally independent from the counterclaim… we vacate the judgment in its entirety.”

The reasoning runs through Jusseaume v. Ducatt, 2011 ME 43, and its catalogue of what process requires: “notice of the issues, an opportunity to be heard, the right to introduce evidence and present witnesses, the right to respond to claims and evidence, and an impartial fact-finder.” Where the excluded claim and the foreclosure arise from the same course of dealing between the same parties, an association cannot assume the money judgment is insulated from a due-process failure on the claim sitting next to it.

The fee award the court would not endorse

The Law Court also flagged, without deciding, that the record did not “fully support” the $36,962.09 fee award, because several thousand dollars of it appeared to relate to a separate Maine Human Rights Commission matter rather than the foreclosure being litigated. It cited Villas by the Sea Owners Ass'n v. Garrity, 2001 ME 93.

That is now two Law Court decisions in sixteen months signalling scrutiny of association fee awards that bundle in adjacent proceedings — the other being footnote 3 of Maples v. Compass Harbor, 2025 ME 19. Maine's fee exposure in association litigation is real: 33 M.R.S. § 1603-116 supports fee recovery in lien enforcement, and the EV-charging statute enacted in 2025, 33 M.R.S. § 576-A, carries a mandatory prevailing-party fee provision. Billing discipline is what keeps those provisions usable.

What it changes operationally

Three things change for a Maine board or manager running a collections file.

An accommodation request in the file is part of the collections file. Where a delinquent owner has asked for a disability accommodation — or where the record shows one was discussed and not delivered — that history travels with the foreclosure. It is not a separate problem to be handled later by different counsel.

Winning the scheduling fight can lose the case. An association that succeeds in keeping an owner's counterclaim out of the trial has not removed a risk; it has created one. The remedy here was vacatur of everything, which means the association returns to the District Court having spent the fees and collected nothing.

Separate the billing. Fees incurred in a Human Rights Commission proceeding are not obviously fees incurred in the foreclosure. Where both are live, the invoices need to distinguish them before a fee affidavit is filed.

Read with its companion case

Six weeks earlier the Law Court decided Oak Hill Condominiums v. Marchetti, 2026 ME 31, holding that a non-owner household member cannot intervene in an association's foreclosure to press her own discrimination claims. The two decisions fit together cleanly and should be read as a pair: the owner's accommodation defence must be heard on the merits, while an occupant's independent claim belongs somewhere other than the foreclosure docket.

What to watch next

The case was vacated and returns for further proceedings, so the merits of the accommodation claim itself — whether the snow-removal and trash arrangement was a reasonable accommodation the association was obliged to provide — remain undecided. No published Law Court decision yet resolves that question under Maine law. Nothing here states who wins on remand, and this article does not predict it.