DCA's own pages have not caught up

The Department's Association Regulation Initiative page — the homeowner-facing resource it points owners to when they have a complaint about their board — still lists "NJAC 5:20 — Meetings of Governing Boards of Associations of Condominiums and Other Planned Real Estate Developments" as current law, and still hosts a 2017-dated PDF of the repealed chapter at that URL.

That is six years after the repeal took effect.

Why a stale citation is a practical problem, not a pedantic one

Three ways it bites, and none of them is hypothetical.

An owner writing to a board demanding compliance with "N.J.A.C. 5:20" is citing nothing. A board that knows this can dismiss a legitimate request on a technicality; a board that does not know it may concede a point that was never at issue. Either way the argument is about the wrong document.

Second, the text is not identical. The requirements were "incorporated as amended" — DCA's own words. Anyone relying on the 2017 PDF still posted on DCA's site is reading a version that was changed on the way across.

Third, and most consequential: 5:26-8.12 is part of the Radburn regulations, and those regulations were partly reversed by the Appellate Division in February 2024. Specifically, the court reversed N.J.A.C. 5:26-8.12(e)2 — the provision on binding votes taken in closed session. So the chapter that now houses the open-meetings rules is itself partly unenforceable, and DCA has proposed no amendments since.

What is actually enforceable

DCA's own enforcement description, in the same information packet, is narrower than most owners expect. It enforces the open-meeting requirement — 48 hours' advance written notice, posted prominently and accessible at all times — and unconditional access to financial records, access that "may not be denied because an owner is not paid up in association fees or has any outstanding violations."

Beyond that, the Department's own text is a list of things it does not do: it does not act on complaints of board misconduct, it enforces "no standard… as to the content of the minutes," it has "no authority to mandate" annual audits, and it has "no jurisdiction" over fraud allegations, which go to the county prosecutor.

What this changes for a board

Replace the citation in the association's own materials. Meeting notices, board policies, welcome packets and election procedures that reference N.J.A.C. 5:20 are out of date; the current citation is N.J.A.C. 5:26-8.12, and the current chapter text governs, not the PDF DCA is still serving.

Where a procedure depends on the closed-session voting provision specifically, counsel should be asked what survives the 2024 decision — because the printed regulation and the enforceable regulation are not the same document, and nothing on the Department's website says so.