The only New Mexico Attorney General opinion on HOAs is about solar panels
The only New Mexico Attorney General opinion on HOAs is about solar panels
2026-09-15 · New Mexico · Regulation · Reported — unconfirmed
New Mexico's Attorney General has one standing opinion that speaks to homeowner associations, it was issued in 2011, and it is about solar panels. A survey of the opinions issued in 2025 and 2026 identified none concerning an association, a covenant or common-interest property — with a coverage limit noted below.1
What Opinion 11-02 says
AG Opinion No. 11-02, issued February 2011 by then-Attorney General Gary King, construes Section 3-18-32(B) NMSA 1978. It reads the statute to allow a homeowners' association to regulate the installation or use of solar collectors so long as the regulation does not “effectively prohibit” them — and it construes “effectively prohibits” to reach not only rules that make installation impossible, but also rules that “add cost or difficulty to the installation or use of solar collectors to a degree that would deter a reasonable consumer.”
A covenant or restriction effective after July 1, 1978 that effectively prohibits a solar collector is void and unenforceable.
The rule a New Mexico board can take from that is short: you may write architectural rules about solar, and you may not write rules that price it out of reach.
The survey, and its limit
The Attorney General's opinions for 2025 and 2026 that could be identified by subject concern Land Grant Permanent Fund distributions, the Per Diem and Mileage Act, indemnity and commercial general liability requirements on a federal land lease, the Indian Gaming Compact, the promotion of an interim university president, the Cybersecurity Act, the constitutionality of the Film Tax Credit Act, the scope of “financial affairs or transactions” under Section 12-6-3(C), and lease purchase agreements under the Public School Capital Outlay Act.
None concerns an association. That said, the state Department of Justice's website refuses automated access, so this survey was assembled from indexed agency pages rather than from the live opinions index. It is a strong indication rather than a certified exhaustive list, and it is described that way deliberately.
Why the absence is the story
An Attorney General's opinion is the closest thing many states have to an authoritative administrative reading of an HOA statute — a free, citable interpretation that boards, managers and owners can rely on without litigating. New Mexico has one, from 2011, on a single question.
There is no AG-level interpretation of the Homeowner Association Act. Nothing on association open meetings. Nothing on records inspection. No advisory letter on fining procedure, board elections, proxy voting or assessment collection. So every contested question about how Chapter 47, Article 16 operates is answered, if at all, by a court, in a case someone paid to bring.
That is consistent with the rest of New Mexico's regulatory posture toward associations. No state agency has subject-matter authority over them, no administrative rule adopted in 2025 or 2026 anywhere in state government mentions homeowners or condominium associations, and the state does not license the people who manage them.
What is on the AG's consumer docket instead
The Attorney General's 2025–26 consumer-protection work in this territory runs to home-remodelling fraud and to solar sales companies — vendors selling to homeowners, rather than associations governing them. The solar-sales enforcement is the nearest adjacent activity to association practice, and it points the other way: the office's attention is on what is being sold to owners, not on how associations treat them.
For an owner in dispute with a board, the practical consequence is that the Attorney General is not the destination. The 2025 session produced a bill that would have made it one — SB 239 would have let a lot owner file a complaint with the Department of Justice and allowed the Attorney General to bring a civil action on that owner's behalf — and it died in Senate Judiciary.
How to use Opinion 11-02 in practice
It is useful to both sides of a solar dispute, which is unusual and worth understanding before citing it.
For an association, it confirms that regulation is permitted. Aesthetic standards, placement rules and approval processes are not automatically void; the statute voids only what effectively prohibits.
For an owner, the “deter a reasonable consumer” formulation is the operative test, and it is about cost and difficulty rather than about outright bans. A condition that adds enough expense or delay to deter a reasonable person is within the opinion's reading of the prohibition.
What neither side gets is a number. The 2025 Legislature was offered one — SB 98 would have made a covenant void if it increased installation cost by more than ten percent or $1,500, or reduced efficiency by more than ten percent — and it died in Senate Judiciary. Until something replaces it, “deter a reasonable consumer” is the whole of the test, and Section 3-18-32's attorney-fee provision means both sides carry real risk in finding out where the line is.
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