A New Jersey bill would revisit an HOA task force report from 1998
A New Jersey bill would revisit an HOA task force report from 1998
2026-09-15 · New Jersey · Legislation · Pending — not yet law
A pending New Jersey bill proposes to study community-association governance, and its own sponsor's statement explains why that should sound familiar.
A4210, introduced February 19, 2026 by Assemblywoman Carol A. Murphy and referred to the Assembly Housing Committee, would create a 13-member Common Interest Community Task Force.1
The hook, in the bill's own words
The statement records that the 1998 Assembly Task Force to Study Homeowners' Associations issued recommendations that are "generally unfulfilled," and that this task force would "revisit many of the same issues."
That is a twenty-eight-year-old unfinished report, cited by a sponsor as the reason for a new one.
What it would study
The laws governing common interest communities — their functions and responsibilities, assessment collection practices, election practices, financial decisions, and contractual relationships with community association managers — and recommend legislation.
The composition
Two Senators and two Assembly members, one each appointed by the Senate President, Senate Minority Leader, Speaker and Assembly Minority Leader; the Commissioner of Community Affairs ex officio; one member appointed by the Chief Justice; and seven public members appointed by the Governor — a community association manager, a planned-real-estate-development builder, a condominium association representative, a cooperative association representative, a homeowners association representative, one person knowledgeable about common interest communities who is not on a board, and one who is.
Members serve without compensation. DCA supplies staff.
The composition is the most interesting thing about it
Look at the seven public seats. Manager, builder, condominium association, cooperative association, homeowners association, a knowledgeable non-board member, a board member.
Four of those seven are industry or association-side. One — the "knowledgeable" non-board member — is the only seat that is not drawn from the governance structure or the businesses that serve it, and it is defined by expertise rather than by being an affected owner.
There is no seat designated for an ordinary homeowner, and no seat for a homeowner-advocacy organisation. Given that the complaint driving New Jersey's association politics in 2026 comes from owners facing assessment increases, that is a notable omission in a body created to study assessment collection practices.
What a task force would do that the Legislature is not doing anyway
This is the honest objection. Roughly thirty-five community-association bills are pending in the 222nd Legislature, covering board training, manager licensure, election mechanics, conflicts of interest, records penalties, dissolution, DCA oversight, reserve funding and age restrictions. Not one has had a committee vote.
The problem in New Jersey is not a shortage of proposals. It is that the two committees holding them have not taken any of them up. A task force that spends a year producing recommendations delivers them into the same committees.
The counter-argument is the one the bill's own statement makes implicitly: those thirty-five bills are uncoordinated, several of them contradict each other, and nobody has reconciled them. Eight bills attack the reserve statute from four incompatible directions. A task force is one way to produce a single coherent proposal instead of thirty-five competing ones.
The 1998 report, and what happened after it
Something did, eventually. The Radburn Act — P.L.2017, c.106 — amended PREDFDA to impose election, nomination and governance requirements on associations nineteen years later, and DCA's implementing regulations followed in 2020.
Those regulations were then partly reversed by the Appellate Division in February 2024, and the chapter containing them was readopted without change in March 2025, with a new expiration date of March 2032. So the one substantial legislative response to the 1998 work is now in a state where the printed rules and the enforceable rules differ, and no agency has fixed it.
A task force proposing to revisit "many of the same issues" would be revisiting them against that background.
Status
A4210 is the reintroduction of A3472, which died with the 221st Legislature; its chain runs back to A2552. No Senate companion, no committee statement, no reprint, no hearing, no vote.
Related New Jersey HOA Topics
Stay on top of New Jersey HOA law
Every week: new New Jersey legislation, court rulings, and regulatory developments affecting condos, planned communities, and property managers. Free.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.