A bill would make townships pay you back
A bill would make townships pay you back
2026-09-15 · Pennsylvania · Legislation · Pending — not yet law
What would happen. SB 963 would require Pennsylvania municipalities either to supply planned communities with the same services they supply everyone else, or to reimburse the association for supplying them. It is not law. It was referred to the Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee on 13 August 2025 and has had no action since.1
What it would create
An entire new Subpart G and Chapter 63 of Title 68, styled the "Municipal Services Equalization and Tax Fairness Act." The core obligation: "(a) Services.--Except as provided under subsection (b), every municipality shall provide to a community the same municipal services it provides to noncommunity dwellings."2
Where a municipality will not provide them, it must negotiate a written agreement to "either supply the municipal services or to reimburse the community for the actual costs incurred by the community for the municipal services." Failure to agree triggers compulsory arbitration under a new § 6305. Reimbursements are "paid at least annually … and no later than 90 days after the date on which the community provides the municipality with copies of invoices."
Which services
Enumerated, and broadly: solid waste, recycling and leaf collection; snow and ice removal; street lighting electricity; sanitary sewer and water line maintenance; police, fire and ambulance services and fire hydrants; and "Any and all other services provided by a municipality or municipal authority to single family dwellings."2
The clause that closes the usual escape
Coverage is deliberately drafted to defeat the standard municipal answer. A community qualifies "regardless of … whether the public has open access to its streets; the streets have been dedicated to the municipality; or the streets meet the construction standards of the municipality."2
Those three conditions are precisely the grounds on which Pennsylvania townships decline to plough or repave a planned community's roads.
The grievance behind it
This is Pennsylvania's long-running "double taxation" argument, and it is one of the few association issues that reliably attracts Republican sponsorship — the prime sponsor is Sen. David Argall, with co-sponsors Stefano and Fontana.
The complaint is straightforward. An owner in a planned community pays municipal property taxes like everyone else. They then pay association assessments that fund trash collection, snow ploughing, street lighting and road maintenance — services the municipality provides directly to households outside the community. The argument is that they pay twice for one set of services, and that the arrangement effectively subsidises the rest of the township.
The municipal answer is equally straightforward: the roads are private, were built to the developer's standards rather than the township's, were never dedicated, and the public has no right to use them. A township that ploughs a private road is spending public money on private property, and if it later has to repave a road never built to its specification it inherits a liability it never accepted.
SB 963 resolves that standoff by legislative fiat, in the association's favour, and the "regardless of" clause is where it does it.
Why it has not moved, and probably will not
Because the bill would impose a substantial and open-ended cost on every municipality in the Commonwealth, and Pennsylvania's municipal associations are effective in Harrisburg.
The compulsory-arbitration mechanism is the provision that makes this more than aspirational and also the one most likely to draw opposition. A municipality that declines to agree does not simply refuse; it is compelled into arbitration with an outcome it does not control, over recurring costs it has not budgeted.
The bill has sat in committee for thirteen months. It is worth noting which committee: Senate Urban Affairs and Housing, the same committee holding the House-passed solar bill, the House-passed clothesline bill, the House-passed manufactured-housing bill and the House-passed ADU bill. That committee is the bottleneck for essentially all of Pennsylvania's community-association legislation, and it has reported almost none of it.
What this means for a board
Not to expect reimbursement. The realistic reading is that nothing changes, and a board budgeting on the assumption that a township will begin ploughing its roads is budgeting on a bill that has had no committee vote.
What the bill does usefully is name the cost categories an association has cause to track anyway. Very few Pennsylvania boards can state what they spend annually on the specific services the township provides elsewhere — refuse collection, snow removal, street lighting electricity, road maintenance, sewer and water line upkeep. That figure is worth knowing for three reasons independent of this legislation: it is the number that supports any negotiation with the municipality now; it is the number that matters to a prospective buyer, and which a separate pending bill would require to be disclosed at resale; and it is the number that tells a board how much of its assessment is buying municipal-type services rather than community amenities.
Some Pennsylvania municipalities do negotiate service agreements voluntarily. Nothing prevents it, and a board that arrives with itemised annual costs is in a materially better position than one that arrives with a grievance.
The stormwater counterpoint
Worth holding alongside the double-taxation argument, because it runs the other way. Pennsylvania municipalities increasingly rely on association-owned stormwater basins to meet their own permit obligations, and the Department of Environmental Protection's guidance confirms they may do so without any agreement with the association. There the flow of unreciprocated value runs from the community to the township.
An association negotiating with its municipality has more to trade than it usually realises, and the basin is the asset.
What to watch next
The session ends 30 November 2026 with no carryover. SB 963 dies then on current form and would need reintroduction in 2027-2028. Sen. Argall is also the Senate sponsor of SB 920, the bill requiring counties to inventory common-interest communities, which has likewise had no action — the data bill and the money bill from the same sponsor, both parked.
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