Minnesota HOA boards must publish agendas and the contracts they plan to sign
Minnesota HOA boards must publish agendas and the contracts they plan to sign
2026-09-12 · Minnesota · Legislation
What happened. Section 4 of Laws 2026, ch. 82 rewrites Minn. Stat. § 515B.3-103(g), the board-meeting provision. Effective 1 January 2027, and by its own terms it “applies to all association activities on or after that date.”1
The hedge is gone
The statute now reads that “all meetings of the board of directors must be open to the unit owners” and that “[t]he board shall give reasonable notice.” The former qualifier — openness and notice “to the extent practicable” — is deleted.
Practicability was the hook that carried a great deal of weight in Minnesota board practice. Its removal is the quiet centre of this section.
Agendas, and the documents themselves
“The board must make the meeting agenda, and contracts or other documents the board intends to approve or disapprove at the board meeting, available to unit owners in any reasonable manner, including but not limited to electronic mailing or posting on the association's website.”
This goes further than an agenda requirement. A vendor contract scheduled for approval — roofing, management, landscaping, insurance broker — becomes an owner-visible document before the board signs it, not after an owner asks for it under the records statute.
A right to speak, and a bar on punishing it
“Before any action is taken on an agenda item at any board meeting open to unit owners, a unit owner, or a person designated in writing by the owner, must be permitted to speak at a time designated by the board on an agenda item.”
The board keeps order: it “may place a reasonable limit on the time a member is allowed to speak and may, after a warning by the chair of the meeting, expel any person who disrupts the meeting.” But the section ends with a hard line: “A board may not impose a fine for exercising the right to speak or provide a written statement.”
What still happens behind closed doors
The closed-session grounds are unchanged — personnel matters, litigation, and criminal activity. Chapter 82 does not narrow them.
It also adds a new safe harbour: no notice or minutes are required for a meeting among board members or officers “if the subject of the meeting is solely to discuss issues related to basic maintenance, or daily operations and management… provided the meeting does not result in a vote or formal action.”
The provision that changes vendor selection, not just governance
Publishing the contract before the vote is a different order of obligation from publishing the agenda, and it interacts with the rest of Chapter 82 in a way that matters to boards before January.
Section 4 of the same act requires three written competitive bids on any property maintenance, construction, repair or reconstruction contract estimated above $50,000, requires affiliated bids to be disclosed before consideration and recorded in the minutes, and requires the association to keep the bid-selection record for six years and make it available to owners.
Combine the two and a Minnesota re-roof in 2027 looks like this: three bids solicited, affiliations disclosed on the record, the winning contract circulated to every owner with the agenda, owners entitled to speak on it before the vote, and the selection rationale archived for six years. That is a materially different procurement from the one most associations ran in 2025.
The safe harbour is narrower than it reads
The new maintenance-and-operations exception is genuinely useful — it means a manager and a board member can discuss a broken door closer without generating a noticed meeting. But it carries two limits that will be easy to trip.
“Solely” does real work. A conversation that starts on daily operations and turns to whether to replace the vendor is no longer solely about operations.
Any vote or formal action forfeits it. The exception holds “provided the meeting does not result in a vote or formal action.” An email thread among a quorum that ends in agreement to proceed is the recurring problem here, and it is not solved by the fact that nobody called it a meeting.
What to put in place before January
Decide the publication channel now. Notice may be given “in any reasonable manner,” and website posting is expressly named. An association without a website or an owner email list has a distribution problem before it has a compliance problem, and the fix has a lead time.
Decide what gets redacted, and on what basis. Contracts up for approval must be made available. Some contain pricing a vendor considers confidential, and some contain personal data. The statute provides no redaction standard for this provision, which means the board's approach should be consistent and written down rather than improvised per contract.
Set the speaking slot in the agenda template. The right is to speak “at a time designated by the board” before action on the item. A standing agenda structure that designates that time is simpler than deciding it live, and it makes the record show compliance.
Separate the open meeting from the closed session in the minutes. With the practicability hedge gone, the closed-session grounds are the only remaining basis for excluding owners, and their use becomes more visible.
The fine bar, read with the retaliation section
The prohibition on fining an owner for speaking is narrow on its face. Section 13 of the same act is not: it adds a general retaliation ban to Minn. Stat. § 515B.4-116, defining retaliation as restricting “any right or privilege a unit owner has, or impos[ing] any fine, penalty, or other charge on a unit owner, not authorized under the declaration, bylaws, or rules or regulations.”
So an association that responds to a vocal owner by suspending amenity access or revoking a parking privilege is not outside the statute merely because it did not issue a fine. The two provisions are meant to be read together.
What to watch next
A separate bill, H.F. 2618 / S.F. 3200, would have required every director to review the governing documents and a plain-language explanation of the law on election or re-election, and appropriated $200,000 for the Minnesota Homeownership Center to write that guide. It died without a hearing in the Senate.3 Part of the idea survived elsewhere: Minn. Stat. § 45.0137 requires the state ombudsperson to produce plain-language explanations of common governing-document provisions and maintain a public website. The mandatory director-training requirement did not pass.
This describes the statute. It is not advice about any particular meeting or contract.
Related Minnesota HOA Topics
- Laws 2026, ch. 82 (S.F. 1750), full session-law text — Minnesota Revisor of Statutes ↩
- “New Laws 2026: Chapter 82” — Minnesota House of Representatives Public Information Services ↩
- H.F. 2618 bill status (director training and plain-language guide; died in committee) — Minnesota Revisor of Statutes ↩
- Minn. Stat. § 515B.3-103 — board of directors; meetings (codified text) ↩
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