Why unanimity did not apply

The court separated two things that look identical on an invoice. ¶38:

“Although the Act states that the default is for members to be assessed for common expenses based on their percentage interests, the Act specifically permits associations to assess unit owners for common expenses other than based on their percentage interests: WIS. STAT. § 703.16(2)(a) states that ‘[f]unds for the payment of common expenses … shall be obtained by assessments against the unit owners in proportion to their percentage interests in the common elements or as otherwise provided in the declaration.’… Although the Act requires unanimous owner approval to change owners' interests in common elements, it does not require unanimous owner approval to change the manner in which unit owners are assessed.”

A percentage interest is an ownership stake in the common elements. An assessment method is how the bill is divided. Section 703.13(4) locks the first. The second is open under § 703.16(2)(a),⁴ and § 703.10(5) sets its price: “The bylaws may be amended by the affirmative vote of unit owners having 67 percent or more of the votes.”³

¶37 adds a second separation worth noting: a percentage interest “may or may not be determined in relation to how many units there are,” so § 703.13(4) “is not the same as a requirement of unanimous owner consent to change the number of units.”

How wide the association's authority runs

¶31 quotes the Wisconsin Supreme Court's characterisation of § 703.15(3)(a)4 — the power to “[e]xercise any … power conferred by the condominium instruments or bylaws” — as an “open-ended grant to a condominium association to construct its bylaws as it sees fit” (Ritter v. Farrow, 2021 WI 14, ¶35). “Common expenses” is itself defined broadly at § 703.02(3) as “the expenses of an association.”

The limit, from ¶27, is conflict: bylaws “are valid and enforceable as long as they do not conflict with the declaration or with state or federal law.” Because this declaration expressly sent the assessment method to the bylaws, there was no conflict to find.

¶35 supplies the democratic backstop to the objection that this lets a board assess anything for any reason: “this argument does not account for the fact that the Association's assessment method was approved by the vast majority of its members.”

The corporate-law shield that is not there

The owner also invoked Wis. Stat. § 181.0612, the nonstock corporation provision on member liability. ¶41 declined: the owner “does not cite any legal authority to support the application of [§] 181.0612 to an association of condominium unit owners formed under WIS. STAT. § 703.15, and for that reason we need not consider this argument.”

Wisconsin HOAs and condominium associations are typically nonstock corporations under ch. 181, and members reach for its liability provisions regularly. No Wisconsin appellate decision in this window applies ch. 181 corporate doctrine to an association board — not § 181.0612, and not the business judgment rule.

The structural problem underneath

Unbuilt or unsold units held by the association are a Wisconsin problem with no statutory answer. Chapter 703 contemplates declarant control and phased expansion, but where a project stalls and the association ends up owning inventory, the Act does not say who funds the gap. That question falls to the declaration, and from there often to the bylaws — which is exactly the route this association eventually used.

What is instructive is the sequencing. The association lost three times in circuit court while charging members more than the declaration's fractional share without having amended anything. It won once it amended. Our Wisconsin assessment limits and budget approval pages cover the framework that produced that result.

What to watch next

The association cross-appealed the 2019 and 2021 summary judgment rulings and the court did not reach the cross-appeal, so the earlier holdings that the association could not charge more than 1/70 were never reviewed on the merits. That leaves an odd record: a rule the association could not satisfy, and a bylaw route around it that a court has now blessed. Whether a published Wisconsin decision ever tests a 67 percent amendment that redistributes cost among existing owners — rather than absorbing association-owned inventory — is the live question this case invites.