Your board can now appeal a building order in five business days
Your board can now appeal a building order in five business days
2026-09-15 · Ohio · Legislation
When a building official issues an order against a condominium building — a structural notice, a balcony barricade, an egress finding, a vacate order — an Ohio association can now demand an expedited appeal that must be heard within five business days. It costs no more than $1,000, and it can be held by video.1
Senate Bill 6, sponsored by Senator Kristina D. Roegner, was signed July 1, 2025 and took effect September 30, 2025. It enacts R.C. 3781.21 and amends R.C. 3781.19 and 3781.20.
The clock
R.C. 3781.21(A)(1):
“Any appeal of an order requested under section 3781.19 or 3781.20 of the Revised Code may be requested to be expedited. If the expedited appeal is requested, the state board of building appeals or a certified municipal or county board of appeals shall do both of the following: (a) Commence the appeal within one day after the request was made, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays as defined in section 1.14 of the Revised Code; (b) Hold a hearing within five days after the request was made, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays…”
The cost
R.C. 3781.21(B): the fee “shall not exceed five hundred dollars for each day the appeal is pending and shall not exceed a total of one thousand dollars for the entire expedited appeal.”
The format
R.C. 3781.21(C): “Notwithstanding any provision of the Revised Code to the contrary, the state board of building appeals or a certified municipal or county board of appeals may conduct an expedited hearing, as described under this section, by means of teleconference, video conference, or any other similar electronic technology.”
That last provision matters more than it looks. A five-business-day hearing is only usable if the parties can actually appear, and an association's engineer, counsel and property manager are rarely in the same city.
The orders that trigger this arise from building condition. Our Ohio condo safety inspections page covers the duty behind them.
Why this belongs in an emergency playbook
Consider the sequence an Ohio condominium board actually faces. An inspector finds a failed support member. The city orders the balconies barricaded and the doors secured pending a structural engineer's assessment of every balcony in the complex — which is precisely what Cincinnati ordered after the Stetson Square collapse in October 2025.
Before September 30, 2025, an association that believed the order was overbroad — every balcony rather than the affected stack, or a vacate order rather than a restriction — waited out the ordinary appeal calendar. Meanwhile owners were displaced or lost the use of their units, and the association was paying for it.
Five business days changes the calculus. It does not make the order go away, and it is no answer to an order a board cannot defend. It makes it possible to narrow one. Our Ohio condo safety inspections page covers the maintenance duty that produces these orders in the first place.
What to have ready before you need it
A structural engineer already under retainer. A five-day hearing is useless if the association's first call to an engineer happens on day one. Associations with wood-framed balconies, decks or elevated walkways should have a relationship, not a search.
Board authority to act without a meeting. Most Ohio declarations let officers act in an emergency, but many boards have never identified who may authorise counsel and an appeal on a Tuesday afternoon. Decide it in advance and record it.
The building's own file. Permits, prior inspection reports, engineering assessments, repair records. An expedited hearing rewards the party who arrives with documents.
The other enacted item that reaches association work
House Bill 227, effective June 9, 2026, amends R.C. 3781.25 through 3781.30 — Ohio's underground utility protection provisions, the “call before you dig” regime.
That is directly relevant to ordinary association projects: fence-post installation, irrigation work, tree planting and removal, sign footings, mailbox replacement, playground equipment. Every one of those is excavation, and every one of them is routinely done by a landscaping contractor on an association's instruction.
We have not read the amended sections, so this summary is no substitute for the text. But the practical question to put to your landscaper and your fencing contractor is the same either way: who files the locate request on our jobs, and can you show me the ticket?
Two other 2026 enactments worth a board's diary
Senate Bill 262, effective September 17, 2026, requires a party to a construction contract to note variations from an industry standard form. Associations sign contracts built on standard forms constantly and rarely read for the modifications; this is a small structural help.
House Bill 105, effective October 6, 2026, enacts a new chapter on consumer legal funding and commercial litigation financing. Not an association statute, but it governs third-party funding of litigation, which occasionally reaches construction-defect claims — the kind of claim an association brings against a developer years after turnover.
The thread through all of it
None of these is an HOA statute. Ohio passed no HOA statutes this General Assembly. What it passed were changes to the building, contracting and recording machinery that associations use constantly — which is where an Ohio board's obligations actually moved in 2025 and 2026.
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