How the dispute got there

The facts are a recognisable community-association fight about development next door.¹

Clipper Mill in Baltimore City was developed as a planned unit development. It has two governing bodies: the Council of Unit Owners of the Millrace Condominium, which governs The Millrace, and the Clipper Mill Homeowners' Association.

In 2017 MCB Woodberry Developer, LLC bought the commercial portion and asked the Baltimore City Planning Commission to amend the PUD. The association and its board members opposed the amendment, lost before the local bodies, and took a petition for administrative mandamus to the circuit court.

Four days after the circuit court's hearing on that petition, the developer sued them — claims including tortious interference with economic relations and civil conspiracy. Five months later the circuit court dismissed the suit as a SLAPP under Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 5-807. The Appellate Court of Maryland affirmed, concluding it was vexatious litigation aimed at deterring the associations from opposing the development.

The developer then voluntarily paid the associations' attorney's fees, and a fee motion was withdrawn. The associations nevertheless brought a class action for malicious use of process against the developer, the law firm that had represented it, and an attorney at the firm. That is the suit dismissed here.

Why the holding matters more than the parties

Strip out the names and this is a rule about what deterrence Maryland offers a volunteer board that objects to something.

Community associations are, structurally, the most common organised opponents of local development. They have standing, money from assessments, and a membership with a direct interest. That makes them the natural target of a suit designed to make opposition expensive — which is precisely what the courts below found had happened.

After Millrace, an association facing such a suit has:

• Early dismissal under § 5-807, with the court required to hold a hearing on the motion as soon as practicable.
• Whatever fees it can recover under existing mechanisms — here the developer simply paid them, which may be why the fee question never had to be litigated.
• No damages action for having been sued, unless it can plead a special injury of the arrest-or-seizure kind.

The asymmetry is deliberate and the court said so: expanding the remedy is the General Assembly's job, and the General Assembly has repeatedly declined.

One detail sharpens the practical point. The associations' costs were reimbursed in this case, voluntarily. The tort claim was about something else — the deterrent effect of being sued at all, and the temporary hit to property values while the litigation ran. Those are exactly the injuries the court held are not special.

The procedural history is itself a lesson in cost

Count the stages this took: local land-use proceedings, a petition for administrative mandamus, a SLAPP suit, a motion to dismiss it, an appeal to the Appellate Court of Maryland, a class action for malicious use of process, a motion to dismiss that, an appeal, a grant of certiorari, argument on 5 May 2026, and a reported opinion on 13 July 2026.

Nine years from the 2017 PUD amendment request. That is the real answer to what a Maryland association's objection to a development can cost, and it is the reason the special-injury question mattered enough to litigate to the top court.

What Maryland did not do this year

The court's reference to the legislature repeatedly rejecting expanded SLAPP remedies is borne out by the 2026 session's record on community-association dispute mechanisms generally.

HB 402, which would have created a state oversight division with hearing panels and a mechanism to postpone court proceedings for at least 90 days while a complaint was considered, passed the House 99–35 and died in Senate Judicial Proceedings without a committee vote.² No standalone alternative-dispute-resolution bill was filed; ADR appeared only as a component of that bill.

So Maryland associations' routes for resolving a dispute short of full litigation are what they were: the courts, the two county commissions in Montgomery and Prince George's, private mediation where the governing documents provide it, and — newly, since October 2025 — the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division, which now has enforcement jurisdiction over every violation of the Condominium Act and the HOA Act.

What to watch next

A SLAPP remedies bill. The court has effectively issued an invitation, and it named the addressee. Maryland's anti-SLAPP statute gives a procedural exit and no damages; changing that is a one-section amendment to § 5-807. Pre-file drafting requests for the 2027 session are due 20 November 2026 and the session convenes 13 January 2027.

Whether anything is filed is the test of how seriously the legislature reads its own high court.