Why infrastructure, and why now

Because it is the thing Pennsylvania buyers most reliably do not understand about the community they are buying into, and the thing that generates the largest unexpected bills.

The items the bill names are not decorative. In a Pennsylvania planned community the roads may be private — meaning the association repaves them, and a repaving is a six-figure event in a community of any size. The stormwater facilities are very often association-owned detention basins with permit-derived maintenance obligations attached. Culverts fail expensively. "Public safety lighting" is street lighting the association may be paying to power and replace. And "inspection fees" points at the recurring municipal charges that attach to those facilities.

A buyer who assumes the township owns the road and the basin, because in the neighbourhood they came from it did, is making a mistake with a large number attached. The bill's theory is that the disclosure should be mandatory and specific rather than buried in a document stack nobody reads.

What is already required, and the gap

A Pennsylvania resale certificate under § 3407 or § 5407 already carries a good deal: assessments, capital expenditures, reserves, financial statements, unsatisfied judgments, and pending litigation. What it does not do is require a plain statement of which physical infrastructure the association owns and is responsible for. That information is technically derivable from the declaration, the plat and the budget — which is to say it is available to a buyer with a lawyer, several hours, and the right questions.

The bill would convert it from derivable to disclosed. That is a real change even though it adds no new underlying obligation, because the association would have to state its position in writing, on the record, at every sale.

The exposure that falls on a board

It is not primarily the fine. It is that many Pennsylvania associations cannot currently answer the question.

Infrastructure ownership in a planned community is determined by what the developer conveyed at turnover, and developer conveyances are frequently incomplete, ambiguous or inconsistent with the recorded plat. Boards routinely discover — during a repaving dispute, or a township stormwater inspection — that a parcel they assumed was theirs is not, or that one they assumed was the township's is. An association required to certify ownership and maintenance responsibility at every closing, with a $5,000 penalty for getting it wrong, would need to actually establish the answer first.

That is arguably the bill's most useful effect and its largest hidden cost. Doing the title work, reconciling deeds against the plat and the county assessment records, and writing down the resulting schedule is an exercise many associations have deferred for twenty years.

The drafting questions

Three that are unresolved on the face of the bill. What counts as a "violation" — an omission, an inaccuracy, or both, and is it per transaction? Who determines that one occurred, given that the bill names no enforcement authority? And why does the duty attach to the association when § 7316 sits in the seller-disclosure chapter, where every other obligation runs to the seller? A seller who fails to pass on a certificate the association correctly supplied would, on a literal reading, still produce a transaction lacking the required disclosure.

What to watch next

HB 2746 was introduced on 25 August 2026 into a session that ends on 30 November 2026, with no carryover. A bill introduced three months before sine die, sitting in committee without a hearing, is realistically a marker for the next session rather than live legislation.

It has a relevant ancestor. In 2023-2024, HB 62 would have required a purchaser-signed acknowledgment in the resale certificate, in type four times larger than the surrounding text, confirming the buyer had received and understood the governing documents. It was referred to House Judiciary in March 2023 and never moved.³ Pennsylvania has now had two attempts in two sessions to strengthen association resale disclosure, from opposite sides of the aisle, and neither has reached a committee vote.