Utahns living in one of the hundreds of thousands of homes that are part of a homeowners’ association have a new resource to resolve common disputes.
The Utah Office of the Homeowners’ Association Ombudsman, part of the state’s Department of Commerce, officially launched last month.
Legislators established the office earlier this year through HB217 as part of an overall effort to regulate homeowners’ associations, or HOAs.
The office and its three employees will serve as a neutral party to help resolve homeowners’ association issues and provide educational resources on the HOA boards’ and residents’ rights and responsibilities.
Utah's new Office of the Homeowners' Association Ombudsman is staffed by (from left) Amy Peuler, Erin Rider and Chris Binning.
The Salt Lake Tribune sat down with Erin Rider, who directs the office and serves as lead ombudsman, to talk about the new role.
These questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What’s the function of your new office? And what are the limitations of what you can do for homeowners and HOAs?
Erin Rider: There are three main things that the office is going to do.
The first thing that we do is we administer the HOA registry. The point of that is transparency, making sure that the public has access to who their representatives are.
The legislature made a change this year where all HOAs are going to have to renew their registration on an annual basis. So we’re going through the entirely new system, which means it’s really important that HOAs are aware that everyone’s going to have to register new on our site. And that registry is really important, because if your HOA is not registered or is not current in its registration, then the HOA technically cannot impose or enforce liens against a homeowner until that registration is current.
The second part is advisory opinions. This is where we kind of go into that ombudsman territory.
If either a homeowner or a board feels like there’s been a violation of state law in their community, they can request an advisory opinion from us. We’re limited to matters of state law, so we’re not necessarily getting into the business of interpreting governing documents. We’re not getting into contractual disputes.
If there’s been a violation of state law, then we’ll look at that, we’ll assess it, make sure we have jurisdiction over it, and then issue a written advisory opinion. The opinions themselves are not legally binding. However, if the issue were to be litigated further and a court agreed with our assessment in the opinion, then the prevailing party could win attorney fees.
Erin Rider is the director and ombudsman leading Utah's new Office of the Homeowners' Association Ombudsman.
The third component is providing education and resources for the public. This will be in the form of information on our website. There won’t be a ton there yet. We’re going to let the data show us where the big questions are, and then put information up there that addresses that.
We also provide free training. We can do that for a group of neighbors. We can do it for a board. We can do it for people who work in the industry – community managers or others who want to better understand the laws or have questions around how HOAs work. There’s a request form on our website.
Why is it important for homeowners and their community associations to have a good working relationship? How does the office help?
Rider: With the governor’s mandate for increasing our housing, more and more development is going into an HOA. A lot of the new builds, especially along the Wasatch Front, are going to be in HOAs. Living in an HOA is different than just buying a single-family home somewhere. You’re buying a community, you’re not just buying a house.
It’s important that homeowners and board members understand their rights and responsibilities in a community. How do you do this successfully? What can boards do? What should they not do? What is the responsibility of a homeowner? How are they supposed to react to things? What are their rights if issues arise? There seems to be a desire for more information and more education about how these work, because HOAs seem to be at least one solution to how to address some of the housing issues that we’re seeing in Utah, and if they continue to be prevalent, then more and more homeowners are going to be living in them.
You said HOAs are part of the solution to addressing our housing crisis. Are they also sometimes part of the problem?
Rider: One of the big challenges with HOAs is that they’re becoming increasingly complex.
If you’re building in a new area, take Eagle Mountain, for example. There was nothing in Eagle Mountain. And sometimes when you get an area like that, the city, from a financing standpoint, has a hard time keeping pace with the rate of development. That means sometimes cities say to the developers, “Great, you can build there, but you’re going to have to put all the infrastructure there yourself,” meaning all that infrastructure then gets put into the HOA.
So now the HOA might be in charge of managing roads, they might be in charge of managing water lines or sewer or other types of utilities. And that gets really, really complex, especially if you have an area like Daybreak where you have a master HOA that oversees the entire area and then associations underneath that. You could have two or three layers of HOAs that you belong to, and you’re paying fees to each one of those.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Master planned communities like Daybreak often have multiple levels of HOAs charging fees.
These are becoming very complex organizations, which is putting more and more responsibility on the board members. And the board members are volunteer homeowners. They’re just people who live in the community.
They’re a solution to how we can build faster. But it also means that those homeowners are shouldering more and more responsibilities in order to get that development done.
Is there anything about Utah’s HOA system that’s unique or harder for homeowners to navigate?
Rider: There’s not a ton of state law that governs HOAs. It’s relatively new territory here. We just haven’t needed it in the past.
This office had been discussed for several years, and for whatever reason, the momentum this year.
As we continue to see more and more construction and more and more HOAs pop up, some of these questions are going to be answered either through case law or through different policy changes. The tension is that these are private contracts between neighbors. So, where is that line between honoring and recognizing the private contracts between neighbors, but also making sure that we’re not creating entities that are overly burdensome on homeowners in Utah?
Without your office, are there other neutral options when people have an issue with their HOA or vice versa?
Rider: It was whatever dispute resolution processes you had in your governing documents. Sometimes that could be a mediator or something. Otherwise, it was lawsuits.
Is there anything else people should know about the office?
Melanie Hall, communications director for the Utah Department of Commerce: We’re also learning. We’re going to hear a lot from people, because the office hasn’t existed like this. We’re going to learn a lot about what’s important to people, where they might have concerns with their own HOAs, where HOA boards are running into problems, both with their homeowners or with their municipalities.
I think this is a great opportunity to start to collect some of this information. That also gives us the opportunity to best inform our legislators of what we’re seeing, and they can decide if there are policy ideas that need to be generated. It’s exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking.
Rider: We’re very much coming into this as a blank slate, so there are no preconceived notions here. We’re not choosing good guys and bad guys, winners or losers. Our goal really is to help people understand what they’re doing. We recognize that a lot of board members are really just trying to do their best and do the right thing. It’s hard when you’re looking at a really complex, 100-page covenants, conditions & restrictions document to know how to really administer that.
If people have questions in any way, shape or form about an HOA, they’re welcome to call our office. Even if it’s not within our jurisdiction, we’re still here to help to the best of our abilities. We can’t provide legal advice. We’re not free attorneys. But we are certainly here to help people find the steps that they need to get the clarity so they can do the job.
Hall: There are tension points for both boards and homeowners, and sometimes resolutions are not quick or easy. I hope people don’t forget that they’re neighbors, and to be neighborly and to engage in a way that is community-building and not divisive.
Rider: In a space that’s as unregulated as the HOA space right now, that also can create an opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of people.
We’re going to look at every piece of information that comes into us, even if we don’t have jurisdiction to actually issue an opinion. We’re tracking all of the issues that come into our office, regardless, and looking at those as we talk to the Legislature and make recommendations.
Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.