The step-in remedy, and why the last sentence matters most

Subsection C.2 is the provision that matters to a Billings board. If the responsible party “fails to maintain all or any portion in reasonable order and condition the City of Billings may assume responsibility for its maintenance and may enter the premises and take corrective action,” and those costs

“may be charged to the Homeowners' Association, or to the individual property owners that make up the Homeowners' Association, and may include administrative costs and penalties. Such costs shall become a lien on all subdivision properties.”

Read that carefully. It is not a lien on the association's parcel. It is not a lien on the lot of whoever failed to pay. It is a lien on all subdivision properties — which means a deferred-maintenance problem the board never resolved becomes an encumbrance on the title of every owner in the community, including the ones who paid their assessments on time.

What this changes about a Billings association's budget

The regulations do most of the work that a well-drafted reserve policy would do, and they do it as a condition of plat approval. Three consequences follow:

• The management plan is a funding document, not a maintenance schedule. It has to estimate costs, staffing and insurance, and say how funding will be obtained. An association operating an open-space parcel without a current, funded version of that plan is operating outside the document its subdivision was approved under.
• Insurance on open space is expressly in scope. That is an easy line to omit in a small association's budget, and in Montana's current property market it is not a small line.
• Changes to the plan need city sign-off. Planning Department approval, or Parks and Recreation where the space is publicly accessible. A board that quietly scales back maintenance to protect the operating budget is making a decision that requires approval it probably has not sought.

Final plat submittal also requires “Homeowners association documents (if applicable)” among project attachments — so the declaration and the management plan are in the city's file from the start.

The pattern across Montana's cities

Billings is not alone in writing associations into its code, and the reason is the Montana Land Use Planning Act compliance deadline that drove a wave of 2026 code rewrites.

Kalispell adopted its implementing zoning and subdivision regulations unanimously at the April 20, 2026 council meeting, and the compiled ordinance's amendment table lists Ordinance 1950, “MLUPA and Land Use Plan Update,” dated May 4, 2026. That ordinance likewise requires “[a]dequate provision for a homeowner's association or other public [entity]” for common areas including private streets and alleys, and defines a “Homeowner's Park” as a subdivision-dedicated park maintained “through private funds provided from annual fees paid to the homeowner's association,” which “may include a community center.”²

So in both cities, new subdivisions will keep arriving with mandatory associations and dues-funded amenities. The association is the city's chosen vehicle for permanent maintenance of things the city does not want to own.

The change nobody is talking about: plat hearings are gone in Kalispell

Kalispell's package also eliminated public hearings for preliminary plats, shifting subdivision approval to staff. The substitute is mailed notice to property owners within 150 feet and 15 business days for written comment, plus a new applications website with email subscriptions.³

For an association, that removes the forum where boards historically appeared on adjacent development. It is a calendaring problem rather than a legal one, and it has a cheap fix: subscribe to the applications feed, and make sure the notice address on file for the association is one somebody reads. A 15-business-day written window that opens while the board is between meetings closes without anyone noticing.

One thing we could not establish

Billings' own land use plan — the Montana Land Use Planning Act growth-policy replacement, as distinct from these subdivision regulations — we could not confirm as adopted, and found no date or resolution number for it. The city's zoning code still references the 2016 growth policy in the published municipal code, and the planning commission's materials describe an infill plan to follow the MLUPA work. Treat Billings' plan status as open.