Why associations want this and why it is contested

The problem is familiar in older Baltimore County neighbourhoods: a vacant or derelict property inside or adjoining a community, generating code violations the county is slow to enforce, while the surrounding owners carry the consequences in property values and safety.

A community association has an obvious interest and, at present, limited standing. Nuisance-abatement statutes typically confine the right to sue to the local government, an adjoining owner, or a tenant. Giving an association the right to sue turns a collective grievance into a case someone can actually bring.

The objection is equally clear and it is about who gets sued. Nuisance abatement is a powerful remedy — it reaches into how someone uses their own property — and handing it to an entity governed by elected volunteers with the power to spend assessment money on litigation creates a route for a board to pursue a neighbour it dislikes under colour of code enforcement. The notice-to-the-county requirement in the bill is a partial answer, keeping the enforcement agency in the loop.

The repeal of the bond requirement cuts both ways for the same reason: it removes the deterrent to a meritorious action and the deterrent to a vexatious one at the same time.

The record

Three sessions, four filings, and the Senate has never taken a vote:¹

• 2024 — HB 417 died after a 27 February hearing; SB 383 died after an 8 February hearing.
• 2025 — HB 335 reached the Senate, where the hearing was cancelled.
• 2026 — HB 305 was reported favourably with amendments by Government, Labor, and Elections, passed second and third reading in the House, went to Senate Judicial Proceedings, was heard on 31 March, and got no report.

A cancelled hearing in 2025 and a hearing with no report in 2026 is a committee declining to engage twice rather than rejecting the idea.

Baltimore County's second loss of the session

This was not the county delegation's only failure in Senate Judicial Proceedings in 2026. HB 1529, which would have established a Baltimore County local commission on common ownership communities with mandatory annual registration for every association in the county — adding a new Real Property §§ 11C-101 through 11C-107 — passed the House 108–24 on 11 March 2026, was heard by the same committee on the same day as HB 305, and also received no report.²

So Baltimore County asked for two things: the power for its associations to sue over nuisance properties, and a commission to handle disputes between associations and owners. Both went to Judicial Proceedings, both were heard on 31 March, and neither was voted on.

CAI's Maryland Legislative Action Committee opposed HB 1529, characterising it as a local version of the statewide oversight division it also opposed, and ran two call-to-action campaigns during the session — reporting 638 messages to House Economic Matters and 1,133 to Senate Judicial Proceedings.³

The county remains outside both regimes. Maryland's only full local common-ownership-community commissions are in Montgomery and Prince George's counties — and Montgomery lost a municipality this year, with Gaithersburg's opt-out taking effect 1 July 2025.

What a Baltimore County association can do now

Nothing new. The routes are what they were:

• County code enforcement, on the county's timetable and at its discretion.
• A private nuisance action by an individual affected owner, who has standing in their own right.
• Covenant enforcement, where the property is inside the community and the conduct breaches the declaration. That route works and Maryland courts enforce it — one 2025 decision affirmed an order authorising a sheriff's presence during the removal of a patio built in breach of covenants — but it reaches only properties bound by the declaration, which is precisely not the derelict property next door.

What to watch next

Whether the bond repeal survives a fourth filing. It is the provision that makes the bill useful and the provision that makes it risky, and a version keeping a modest fixed bond rather than repealing the requirement altogether would be harder to object to.

Chamber choice matters more, though. Six community-association bills went to Senate Judicial Proceedings in 2026 and none came out. A Senate-side pre-file, with drafting requests due 20 November 2026, is the only change of approach the record suggests would make a difference.