New Jersey readopted its PREDFDA association rules unchanged through 2032
New Jersey readopted its PREDFDA association rules unchanged through 2032
2026-09-15 · New Jersey · Regulation
New Jersey's community-association regulations were up for renewal in 2025, and the Department of Community Affairs renewed them exactly as they were.
The Notice of Readoption appears at 57 N.J.R. 4(1), dated April 7, 2025 and filed March 12, 2025. Its operative sentence: DCA "reviewed the rules and has determined that they should be readopted without change."1
What was readopted
All of N.J.A.C. 5:26 — the rules under the Planned Real Estate Development Full Disclosure Act — across eleven subchapters. That includes Subchapter 8, the community-association provisions that carry the Radburn Act election machinery, and Subchapter 11 on administration and enforcement.
The chapter had been scheduled to expire April 4, 2025. The readoption took effect March 3, 2025 with a new expiration date of March 3, 2032 — the seven-year cycle set by P.L.2011, c.45.
What had changed in the meantime
Two things, both of which a reader might have expected to produce conforming amendments.
In January 2024, P.L.2023, c.214 amended PREDFDA itself, adding the capital reserve study and funding obligations now at N.J.S.A. 45:22A-44.2 and 45:22A-44.3. Those sections have no corresponding rules in Chapter 5:26 and did not acquire any in the readoption.
In February 2024, the Appellate Division decided the Community Associations Institute's challenge to the Radburn Regulations, reversing several of them — including provisions on board representation, binding votes taken in closed session, and absentee ballots — and directing DCA to clarify others. The readoption did not address that decision.
Why a no-change readoption is not a neutral act
Readoption is not automatic. Under New Jersey's sunset regime a chapter lapses unless the agency affirmatively readopts it, and the readoption is the moment at which the agency reviews whether the rules still work. DCA reviewed and concluded they did.
The effect is that the regulations governing association elections in New Jersey — including subsections a court has already held invalid — remain on the books in their original form, and the next scheduled occasion for the agency to revisit them is 2032.
What this actually changes for a board
The practical problem is that the printed rule text and the enforceable rule text are not the same document, and neither DCA's website nor the Administrative Code flags the difference. A board running an election from a 2025 printout of Subchapter 8 may be following a regulation that no longer binds anyone.
Where an election procedure turns on a reversed provision — most obviously the closed-session voting rule and the absentee-ballot handling — the safer course is to read the governing documents and the PREDFDA statute directly and treat the regulation as, at best, a gloss. That is an uncomfortable answer, and it is the honest one: New Jersey currently has an election rulebook that is partly unenforceable and wholly unamended.
The clarifications the court asked for have not appeared
The 2024 decision directed DCA to clarify rules on vote tallying, good-standing notification, minutes and recordings, meeting notice, and bylaw-amendment procedure. Those are exactly the areas that generate disputes in New Jersey communities.
We found no rule proposal, adoption or administrative correction addressing any of them in DCA's published index covering 2023 through September 2026. The only 5:26 item in that entire index is the April 2025 no-change readoption itself.
The legislative alternative is going nowhere either
Bills to add a DCA ombudsman, an advisory council and complaint jurisdiction over associations, and a separate bill to create a Common Interest Community Task Force, are both pending in the Assembly Housing Committee. Neither has been heard. For the moment, the regulatory picture for New Jersey association governance is a 2020 rulebook, partly reversed, readopted unchanged, locked until 2032.
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