The direction of travel, and why it is striking

Every other movement in Maryland this year ran the other way. Prince George's County adopted prescriptive county-wide rules in March 2026. Baltimore County's delegation tried to create a commission and lost in the Senate. Charles County won mandatory board training after three attempts. The state legislature debated an oversight division that passed the House.

Gaithersburg is the only jurisdiction in Maryland that removed community associations from a regulator's reach in this period, and it did so four years after choosing to be in it. That is a small but real data point in an argument usually conducted entirely in the abstract: a municipality that actually ran the experiment decided against continuing it.

The city's own published materials do not set out a rationale, and we found no published explanation. The ordinance number for the 2025 repeal is also not confirmed — the city's page returned an access error on direct retrieval, so the record we can stand behind is the date chain (7 April approval, 27 April effective, 1 July operative) and the substance, both taken from the city's own description of the change.¹

Meanwhile the county raised its fee

In the same season, Montgomery County reset the charge that funds the commission. Executive Regulation MCER No. 20-25, Establishment of Annual Registration Fee for Common Ownership Communities, was adopted and took effect 29 July 2025, superseding a temporary regulation and codified at COMCOR 10B.07.02.² The fee, the regulation says, must be set at an amount sufficient to fund the department's provision of dispute resolution and technical assistance.

We could not verify the new per-unit amount. The county's published fee schedule still ends at FY2024 at $6.50 per unit — the history runs $1.50 from FY1993, $2.25 from FY2004, $3.00 from FY2010, $5.00 from FY2017, $6.50 from FY2024 — and the current figure is available only from the housing department directly.³ Any published 2026 number should be checked against the department, not against the schedule.

The penalties on that schedule are, by contrast, explicit and worth knowing: failing to register and pay is punishable by a civil fine of $500, and “each day that a violation continues is a separate offense.” A non-registered community is also ineligible to file a dispute under Montgomery County Code § 10B-7(a)(2).³

The registration-as-gate design is now common to both Maryland counties that run commissions: Prince George's got the same bar on unregistered filings through Chapter 597 of 2025.

Who else is out

Gaithersburg joins a standing list of Montgomery County municipalities exempt from the CCOC: Chevy Chase Village, the Town of Chevy Chase, Garrett Park, Kensington, Laytonsville, Poolesville, Somerset and Washington Grove. Takoma Park has been included throughout; Rockville opted in from 1 January 2016 and Gaithersburg from 1 July 2022 under the 2021 ordinance — which makes the city's participation roughly three years long in practice.³

What we could not establish

Two gaps a reader should know about. There is no published CCOC annual report for 2025 or 2026, so the commission's current caseload is not a matter of public record. And Expedited Bill 7-25, Common Ownership Communities – Registration Fees, had a public hearing on 25 March 2025 — the legislative predicate for MCER 20-25 — but its enactment date and final text could not be retrieved from the county's systems.⁴

What to watch next

Whether any Gaithersburg association registers voluntarily. That is the measure of whether the city removed a burden associations resented or a service owners used, and it is knowable: the CCOC maintains a registration list.

Also whether Rockville follows. It opted in nine years earlier under the same mechanism, and a second municipal exit would turn one city's decision into a trend.