Where the "built for high-rises" argument is right, and where it is not

It is worth separating, because the complaint is half correct and the half that is wrong is the expensive half.

On structural inspections, the argument has real force but not in the way it is usually put. The statute's inspection duty attaches to a "covered building" — a residential condominium or cooperative building with a primary load-bearing system of concrete, masonry, steel or hybrid construction. The Department of Community Affairs has stated flatly that "the height of your association building has no bearing" on that status. So a two-storey masonry building is covered and a wood-frame walk-up is not. Height was never the test; construction type is.

On reserve studies, the argument does not work at all. DCA has been explicit: "the capital reserve study requirements apply to all PRED associations and not just those associations that are covered buildings." A garden-style senior community with no covered building at all still owes a study and a 30-year funding plan.

The only escape is the exemption for an association "with less than $25,000 in total common area capital assets" — and DCA reads "common area capital assets" broadly enough to include hallways, lobbies, recreational facilities, exterior walls, parking lots, roofs, gardens and landscaping, including exclusive-use areas. In practice that exemption is close to unreachable for any community with a clubhouse and a parking lot.

So the increases are not a misapplication

That is the uncomfortable conclusion the reporting points at without quite stating. The $300-to-$400 increases in Ocean County senior communities are what the statute requires, applied correctly, to communities that had been under-funding reserves for years.

The 2025 amendment made this worse in one specific respect and better in another. It deleted the ten-year phased cure for large deficiencies. It also created the 85 percent funding option, with its 20-point bold-font notice — which is the only lever a board actually has, and which expires after five association fiscal years.

Where the political energy went

Straight into Ocean and Atlantic county legislative delegations. A318 and S146, which would limit the law to buildings three stories or taller and double the reserve catch-up window to twenty years, are sponsored by Assemblymen Kanitra and McGuckin and Senators Holzapfel and Amato — District 10 and its neighbours, which is Noonan's own political geography.

Those bills were introduced on January 13, 2026. Neither has had a committee vote in the eight months since.

What a board in one of these communities can actually do

Four things, none of which is waiting for Trenton. Determine whether any building meets the covered-building definition, because that drives the inspection cost. Get a reserve study from a credentialed specialist or licensed engineer, because a board cannot prepare one itself. Decide between plan funding and the 85 percent option with the notice it requires, and record the reasoning. And write down the association's last usable fiscal year under that option, because the statute counts association fiscal years and names no calendar date.