What it would change in practice

A great deal, because the current Pennsylvania position is much narrower than owners generally expect.

Today an association's records obligations come from two places. 68 Pa.C.S. § 5316 requires an association with more than twelve units to prepare annual financial statements within 180 days of its fiscal year end, to provide a copy to an owner who asks in writing within 30 days, and to keep financial records reasonably available for examination.³ And 15 Pa.C.S. § 5508 supplies the nonprofit corporation law's record-inspection right, which is conditioned on a proper purpose.

Both of those are member rights, both are qualified, and neither comes with an independent adjudicator. The practical remedy when an association simply does not respond is a complaint to the Attorney General's Bureau of Consumer Protection under § 5316, or litigation.

SB 873 would replace that with a presumption of openness, a named officer, statutory clocks, and appeals to a state body that issues binding determinations. It is a structural change, not an incremental one.

The questions the one-liner does not answer

This is where a board's attention belongs, because a bill this short leaves a great deal to be worked out, and the answers decide whether the obligation is manageable or crushing:

• Condominiums and cooperatives are not included. The cross-reference is to § 5103 — the planned community definition. Associations under the Uniform Condominium Act (Chapter 31 and following) and the Real Estate Cooperative Act are outside the bill as drafted. Whether that is deliberate or an artefact of drafting, it produces an odd result: two adjoining communities with identical practices would face different obligations because of which chapter they were created under.
• Which exemptions apply. The Right-to-Know Law's exemptions are written for government — noncriminal investigations, personal security, collective bargaining. The exemptions an association would actually need concern owner financial information, delinquency and collection files, violation records, and privileged communications about litigation with owners. Some of those map onto existing exemptions and some do not.
• Who does the work. A self-managed volunteer association would need an open-records officer subject to statutory deadlines. That is an unfunded obligation falling on people who are not paid and did not sign up for it.
• Cost recovery. Agencies may charge duplication fees under the law's fee schedule; whether that meaningfully covers an association's compliance cost is doubtful.

The Pennsylvania backdrop

Pennsylvania's Attorney General has addressed a related boundary in a different context — whether a private nonprofit becomes a public entity by receiving public funds — but nothing in current Pennsylvania law makes a community association an agency by virtue of what it does. SB 873 would do it by statutory definition rather than by any funding or function test.

For boards, the more useful observation is about the pressure this bill represents rather than its prospects. Bills of this kind get introduced when owners cannot get records through the routes that already exist. An association that answers a § 5316 request promptly and completely is not the association generating this legislation.

What to watch next

SB 873 has been in the Senate State Government Committee for fifteen months with no action, and the session ends 30 November 2026 with no carryover. On the current record it dies then and would need reintroduction in 2027-2028.

It is worth reading alongside HB 1174, which would extend the notice period for association meetings from ten days to 21, and which has sat in a House committee since April 2025. Both are transparency bills, neither has moved, and the appetite they reflect has not gone anywhere.