The two shapes of ambiguity

Paragraph 27 is the part likely to be quoted most: “Ambiguities typically appear in [one of] two forms: …because of vague or ambiguous language…or because two or more contract provisions, when read together, give rise to different or inconsistent meanings…”

The second kind is the one that reaches association documents. A declaration, a recorded plat, and an amendment drafted years later by different hands routinely define the same term differently. In Crosbie some provisions plainly called the disputed parcels common area, while a 2016 amendment said “[c]ommon areas are…the existing paved areas” and the plat's own labelling pointed elsewhere.

Because the documents could not be harmonised, the court held at paragraph 41 that parol evidence “is admissible to clarify the meaning of [the] ambiguous provisions” — here, sworn statements that a trustee never intended the parcel as common area and evidence that it had been fenced and used exclusively by the original owner. That created a genuine dispute of fact and defeated summary judgment.

The statute the district court had leaned on

The judgment below rested on Utah Code § 10-20-809(2), the provision barring private ownership of designated subdivision common area without specified approvals, formerly numbered § 10-9a-606. That statute works only once you know what the documents designated. Where the designation is itself ambiguous, the statute has nothing to attach to.

The Community Association Act's own definition of “common areas” sits at § 57-8a-102(5), a section amended in the 2026 session. Definitions do not resolve document conflicts either; they supply the vocabulary the documents are read in.

Why this reaches ordinary associations

Most Utah communities have at least one parcel whose status nobody has tested — a detention basin, a strip along a fence line, a remnant left over from a phase boundary. The assumption that a plat label settles it is exactly the assumption Crosbie disturbs. Where the declaration's defined terms and the plat's labels disagree, the question goes to a factfinder along with whatever the developers can be shown to have intended.

Our Utah governing statute page sets out the document hierarchy and the applicability test that decides which of Utah's two chapters governs a given community — itself a question decided by what the declaration says and, failing that, by whether the plats are designated as condominium plats.

Selling common area, when it is common area

When the status is settled, Utah does have a procedure. Section 57-8a-232 governs the sale of common areas, and Senate Bill 201 of the 2025 session added an attorney-in-fact mechanism at subsection (5): “an authorized representative of the association may act as attorney-in-fact for the association's lot owners in executing a sale, conveyance, transfer, or other disposition of the common areas following an affirmative vote.”²

That solves a real problem — assembling signatures from every owner in a community — but only after the vote, and only for property everyone agrees is common.

The longer line of Utah covenant cases

Crosbie cites Cocks v. Swains Creek Pines Lot Owners Association, 2023 UT App 97, for the contract-interpretation rule. Behind that sits WDIS, LLC v. Hi-Country Estates Homeowners Association, 2022 UT 17, holding unsigned covenants voidable rather than void, and the companion 2023 Utah Supreme Court decisions in the Hi-Country Estates litigation on covenant ratification and assessment enforcement. Utah's appellate courts have been working the same seam — what a recorded document actually binds — for most of a decade.

What to watch next

The case returns to the district court for trial on the developers' intent. Utah's other pending association case at the appellate level is Andrews v. Stoney Brook Condominium Association, 2025 UT App 126, on which the Utah Supreme Court granted certiorari in April 2026.³