What the unanimity rule means in practice

Under § 70-23-403 as it still reads, changing the undivided-interest percentages in a Montana condominium requires the agreement of every affected unit owner, plus a recorded declaration amendment. Not a supermajority. Not every owner who votes. Every owner with an interest in the particular common element.

The situations where that bites are ordinary rather than exotic:

• A declaration whose original percentages were wrong — a square-footage error, a phase that was built differently from the plan, a unit that was combined or divided.
• Adding or removing a building or phase where the declarant's development rights have lapsed.
• Correcting an allocation that no longer matches reality after a conversion, an expansion, or a boundary relocation.
• An owner who cannot be found, or who has died with the estate unadministered. Unanimity requires a signature from someone; absence is not consent.

Because the percentages drive common-expense liability and voting weight, an error in them is an error in every assessment the association levies. And it cannot be fixed over a single objection.

Why a narrow fix failing matters to the broad rewrite

This is the connective point. HB 362 was a surgical amendment — one statute, one threshold, one word — and it could not get through the 2025 session. Its subject is also squarely addressed by the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, whose allocation and amendment provisions exist precisely to solve unanimity deadlocks.

So the failure of the narrow fix is part of the argument for the broad one. The Legislature's own interim committee has recorded that Montana's “code offers little guidance regarding owners' associations and what guidance is offered is relatively old. The last major overhaul occurred in 1965 with the passage of the ‘Unit Ownership Act’.” A committee draft of the uniform act goes to a vote on September 17, 2026.

Until something passes, the 1965 statute governs, unamended in 2025 and unamended in any part.

What a condominium board can actually do about a bad allocation

Nothing in this changes the analysis of any particular declaration, and a re-allocation question is one for the association's own counsel and its own documents. But the practical order of operations is worth stating at category level:

1. Establish what the declaration actually allocates, and against what measure. Many Montana declarations state percentages without stating the method, which is itself the source of the dispute.
2. Check whether the declaration supplies its own amendment procedure for allocations, and whether it purports to set a threshold below unanimity. That raises a question about the interaction with the statute — not one to resolve from a news article.
3. Establish who the affected owners are, including lenders and estates, before assuming a consent campaign is feasible.
4. Keep the reserve and budget consequences separate from the allocation question. An association can fund correctly against an imperfect allocation; it cannot levy against an allocation it has quietly changed.

A 75 percent vote is not made sufficient by a bill that once proposed it. That bill died on March 12, 2025.³