Governing Documents Cheat Sheet

Most board members inherit the job the same way: someone hands over a banker’s box, or emails a zip file, and that’s the orientation. Somewhere in there are eighty pages of legal language that govern every decision you’re now responsible for making — and nobody tells you which parts matter.

Almost all of it doesn’t, day to day. Six sections do. This worksheet is a place to write down what yours say, once, so you stop re-reading the declaration every time a question comes up.

Your documents rank, and the ranking decides arguments

This is the part that surprises new boards most. You don’t have one governing document, you have four, and they sit in a hierarchy. When two of them conflict, the higher one wins:

1. Declaration (CC&Rs) — the constitution. Recorded against the property, binds every owner, hardest to change.
2. Articles of incorporation — the filing that makes the association a legal entity.
3. Bylaws — the operating manual. Meetings, elections, board authority.
4. Rules and regulations — day-to-day life in the building. Easiest to change, and the weakest of the four.

Knowing the order settles a real category of dispute. A rule the board passed last year cannot override something the declaration says, no matter how reasonable the rule is or how firmly the board voted for it. If someone tells you “that’s the rule,” the follow-up question is which document the rule rests on.

The six sections that actually decide things

Two live in your declaration, three in your bylaws, and one straddles both:

Maintenance responsibilities — what the association maintains and what you handle as an owner. This is where most owner disputes originate. When a pipe leaks, the answer to whose problem is this is in this section, and it is usually less obvious than either party expects.

Assessment authority — your unit’s percentage interest, whether the board can raise dues without an owner vote, any cap on that increase, and how large a special assessment the board can levy on its own before it has to go to the owners. Boards get into trouble here more than anywhere else, usually by discovering the threshold after they’ve already voted.

Voting thresholds — different decisions need different levels of approval. Amendments typically require a supermajority of all owners, not just those who show up. That number determines whether a proposal is realistic before you spend three meetings on it.

Meeting requirements, board elections, and board authority — the bylaws sections that determine whether what you did at the last meeting actually counts. Notice periods and quorum rules are the most common reason a board decision gets challenged later.

The part that isn’t in your documents

Your state statute can override your governing documents, and frequently does. Many states cap how much a board may raise regular assessments in a year without a member vote regardless of what the declaration permits. If you don’t find a cap in your own documents, that is not evidence you don’t have one — it means you haven’t checked the statute yet. The worksheet leaves a line for it.

The other commonly missed piece is amendments. An amendment supersedes the original text, so everything you write on this sheet is only current if you have every amendment that’s ever been recorded. Amendments filed years before your term still bind you, and they’re the documents most likely to be missing from the file you inherited. Your county recorder of deeds or the outgoing management company can tell you what’s on record. There’s a tracking table for logging them.

How to use it

Fill it in once, at the start of a term, with the whole board in the room if you can. It takes an evening. After that it becomes the thing you check before a vote instead of the thing you promise to look up later — and when the next board takes over, it’s the single most useful page you can hand them.

Not legal advice. Read your own governing documents and check your state statute.