The enforcement mechanism is the unusual part

Most document-access rules in American community-association law are remedies without teeth: an owner who is refused records sues, and recovers costs if they win. Prince George's County wrote a schedule of fines instead, keyed to a 48-hour availability standard.¹

If documents are not available to an owner within 48 hours:

• First violation — up to $500, where not provided within 10 business days
• Second — up to $1,000, within 20 business days
• Third — up to $5,000, within 40 business days

And then the provision that will get a management contract renegotiated: the fines are to be “satisfied from funds taken from Property Management Company/Community Manager contracts as liquidated damages” — or from board funds where there is no management contract.¹

That routes the penalty to the manager rather than to the owners who would otherwise fund it out of assessments. It also places the manager in the position of primary compliance obligor: the rules make the management company or community manager responsible for maintaining the documents, with the board responsible only in the absence of one.

The residency rule is the one to argue about

Requiring that a board majority, including the president, reside in the community is a substantive restriction on who may hold office — and Maryland's Condominium Act and HOA Act impose no such requirement. In a county with meaningful investor ownership and many associations where non-resident owners hold units, it changes who can be elected.

It is also the provision most exposed to a preemption argument: a county resolution promulgated under a local programme narrowing eligibility for an office created by state statute is not obviously within the promulgating authority. Nothing in the public record suggests it has been challenged.

How this fits the county's registration regime

CR-005-2026 does not stand alone. The state legislature gave Prince George's County the financial machinery a year earlier.

House Bill 360 of 2025, Chapter 597 — a delegation bill designated PG 408-25 — passed the House 138–0 and the Senate 42–2, was signed on 13 May 2025 and took effect 1 July 2025. It lets the County Executive set an annual registration fee sufficient to fund the county's administrative hearing process, directs the revenue to that process, and — the enforcement hook — bars an unregistered entity from filing a dispute.²

Operationally: registration is online only, due annually by 31 January, and must give the principal officers' names, titles and business phones, a designated contact, and the management company's details. The management company registration fee is $100; there is no fee for a self-managed association.³

Put the two together and an association that misses the January deadline loses its access to the county's dispute forum while remaining subject to the county's fines. Registration is the gate.

Two counties, going opposite directions

Prince George's is not the only Maryland county running a commission — Montgomery County's is older and busier — but the two moved differently in the same period. Montgomery raised its registration fee by executive regulation and then lost a municipality: Gaithersburg repealed its opt-in, so from 1 July 2025 associations inside the city are no longer required to register with or use the county commission.

Baltimore County tried to join and failed. House Bill 1529 would have established a local commission with mandatory annual registration for every association in the county, adding Real Property §§ 11C-101 through 11C-107. It passed the House 108–24 on 11 March 2026, got a Senate Judicial Proceedings hearing on 31 March, and died without a committee vote.⁴

So the map is unchanged: two counties with full local dispute-resolution bodies, one municipality newly outside one of them, and a third county's attempt dead in the Senate.

What to watch next

The reserve-depletion notice duty is incomplete on its face — it triggers at a threshold the Commission on Common Ownership Communities is to set, and no threshold appears in the public record. Until one is published, the duty has no operative trigger.

The other open question is the first fine. A $5,000 liquidated-damages charge lifted out of a management contract is the kind of provision that produces either quiet compliance or a test case, and there is no published enforcement action yet.