The money, which is the actionable half of this story

Rhode Island's Office of Energy Resources runs ChargeRI, an incentive programme for ENERGY STAR-certified EV supply equipment. Its eligibility language names associations expressly:

“Owners, landlords, property managers, or authorized HOA representatives of residential buildings with 5 or more units, including properties serving renters.”²

Multi-unit dwellings are a designated priority sector. The standard incentive covers 90% of cost, capped at $12,000 per station and $100,000 per site, with a five-percentage-point adder across all parameters for properties in Environmental Justice communities. Awards are first-come, first-served, and as of August 21, 2026 the programme page reported $3,437,060 unreserved.

The programme page states no launch date or application deadline, so neither can be relied on until confirmed with the programme. There are companion programmes — PowerUpRI for residential rebates and Electrify RI for workplace, multi-unit and publicly accessible charging — whose current terms this column did not verify.

So the position is: Rhode Island will not stop an association banning a charger, and will pay for the association to install one.

What a board's actual authority is today

Broad, and worth using deliberately rather than by default.

Approving or refusing an owner's installation. With no right-to-charge statute, the answer comes from the declaration and bylaws. A charger in a deeded parking space still typically requires running conduit through common elements, which engages § 34-36.1-2.11 — an owner “[m]ay make any improvements or alterations to his or her unit that do not impair the structural integrity or mechanical systems or lessen the support of any portion of the condominium” — and, where common elements would be encumbered, § 34-36.1-3.12, which requires the approval of persons entitled to cast at least eighty percent of the votes to convey or subject common elements to a security interest. Our Rhode Island EV charging page covers how those provisions interact.

Installing a shared facility. Section 34-36.1-3.02 gives the association power to regulate the use, maintenance, repair, replacement and modification of common elements. A board-installed bank of chargers in common-area parking is ordinary common-element work, subject to the usual budget and approval rules — and, for anything above the fifteen-thousand-dollar range, to whatever the declaration says about capital improvements.

Charging for the electricity. The dead bill would have put electricity cost on the installing owner, including a separate meter where needed. Absent a statute, an association that permits an installation without addressing metering is agreeing to socialise the cost of one owner's fuel.

The licence-plate wrinkle nobody expects

Rhode Island enacted P.L. 2026, ch. 386 (H 7135 Substitute A) on June 19, 2026: “Electric and hybrid motor vehicles — registrants — location — notification by division of motor vehicles.” It is not an association provision and this column has not analysed its text, but a board planning charger capacity should know that the state is building a picture of where electric vehicles are registered. That is the kind of data a future right-to-charge bill gets drafted from.

What a board can do now

Decide your policy before an owner asks, not after. A refusal improvised under pressure is the fact pattern that produces a bill next session. A written policy — where chargers may go, who pays for conduit, how electricity is metered, who insures the equipment, what happens on resale — is defensible and takes one meeting.

Look at ChargeRI before you refuse. An association that installs shared chargers at ten percent of cost has a better answer to an owner's request than a prohibition, and it keeps the equipment, the siting and the liability inside the association's control.

Put the cost allocation in writing either way. The four cost heads in the dead bill — installation, structural and service upgrades, electricity with a separate meter, and damage on installation or removal — are a complete checklist and they were drafted by a legislature. Use them.

Do not assume a neighbouring state's rule. Massachusetts and Maine have right-to-charge provisions and Rhode Island does not. An owner or a contractor arriving with a Massachusetts expectation is arriving with the wrong law.

What to watch next

Reintroduction in January 2027. H 7338 was a single-sponsor bill with no Senate companion, which is the profile of a measure that has not yet found its coalition — and the four-chapter drafting shows somebody thought carefully about how to reach every kind of Rhode Island association. Watch also whether the sixteen-member condominium law commission, reporting by December 31, 2027, treats charger installation as part of the “long-term affordability” question it was directed to study. The Rhode Island pattern for the last two sessions has been that the secondary market and the grant programmes move before the statute does.