The other Nebraska laws that reach your association.
Nebraska has no comprehensive homeowners’ association act. What it has is a condominium law split at 1984, one very good lien statute, and a handful of single sections filed where nobody would look — a road-maintenance provision in the highways chapter, a short-term-rental rule in the cities chapter, an act that voids a transfer fee written into a covenant. These are those, and the things people wrongly assume Nebraska has.
The seven statutes hosted in full on this tab do most of the work, but a few of Nebraska’s most practical rules for community associations are single sections sitting on their own. Because these are scattered provisions we don’t reproduce in full, this page summarises them and cites the section so you can read it at the source.
A county board of commissioners may contract with a homeowners’ association to provide road maintenance or snow and ice removal on the nonpublic roads that serve the community. It is a genuinely useful power, and it is narrower than it is usually described. All four of these must hold: the county must have a population of sixty thousand inhabitants or more; the association must be incorporated and represent at least fifty individual housing units; those units must lie wholly within the county and not be part of any sanitary and improvement district or incorporated municipality; and the contract must provide for payment to the county of an amount that fairly represents the county’s cost of the extra service. It is a purchase, not a subsidy.
A municipality shall not adopt or enforce an ordinance or other regulation that expressly or effectively prohibits the use of a property as a short-term rental, and may regulate one specifically only if it demonstrates that the primary purpose is to protect the public’s health and safety. “Municipality” here means a city or village, and “short-term rental” is defined as a residential property — expressly including a single-family dwelling or a unit in a condominium, cooperative or time-share — rented wholly or partly for a fee for not longer than thirty consecutive days.
Three things sit outside that bar. A municipality may still impose a sales or occupation tax on short-term rentals (subsection (4)); it may limit or prohibit their use for five named purposes — housing sex offenders, operating a structured sober living home or similar enterprise, selling illegal drugs, selling alcohol or another activity needing a liquor permit or licence, or operating a sexually oriented business (subsection (5)); and it must apply ordinary land-use, noise, nuisance and property-maintenance rules to a short-term rental in the same manner as another similar property (subsection (6)).
Read who it binds. This section restrains municipalities, and it says so expressly: § 18-1758(7) provides that the section “shall not be construed to affect regulations of a private entity, including a homeowners association organized under the Condominium Property Act or the Nebraska Condominium Act.” A city cannot ban short-term rentals; your declaration still can.
The Private Transfer Fee Obligation Act is the one Nebraska statute on this page that voids something written into a declaration. A private transfer fee obligation is an obligation “arising under a declaration or covenant recorded against the title to real property” that requires payment of a fee on a later transfer (§ 76-3107). Any such obligation recorded or entered into in Nebraska on or after March 11, 2011 does not run with the title, does not bind a later owner, purchaser, mortgagee or trustee, and is void and unenforceable (§ 76-3109) — and the section adds that one recorded before that date is not thereby presumed valid.
What it does not touch is what your association actually charges. § 76-3106(7) excludes from “private transfer fee” any fee, charge, assessment, dues, fine, contribution or other amount payable to a homeowners, condominium, cooperative, mobile home or property owners association under a declaration, covenant or bylaw — including fees or charges payable for estoppel letters or certificates. So the Act kills a transfer fee dressed up as an assessment while leaving assessments and resale-statement charges alone.
Nebraska has a Collection Agency Act. No person, firm, corporation or association may conduct or operate a collection agency in Nebraska until it has secured a license, and operating without one is a Class III misdemeanor for each day the business is conducted — with an officer or agent who personally participates guilty in their own right. A regular employee of a duly licensed agency does not need a collection agency licence of their own (§ 45-601) — but an employee who solicits or collects accounts must hold a solicitor’s certificate issued by the board, which becomes null and void when the employment ends and can be suspended or revoked in its own right (§§ 45-610, 45-613, 45-615). Licensing is administered through a Collection Agency Licensing Board (§ 45-603).
Note what that is and is not. It is mostly a licensing regime, and the board must act on a complaint only when it comes from the collector’s own client or customer — not from you, the debtor; it may cite a licensee on its own motion (§ 45-613). It is not entirely silent on conduct: a creditor who duns you under a fictitious name suggesting a third party is collecting is itself a “collection agency” needing a licence (§ 45-602(2)(b)); a licensee’s bond is conditioned on reporting and remitting collections to its client within forty-five days of each month’s close, with a direct action on the bond by anyone damaged (§ 45-608); and no licensee or solicitor may engage in the practice of law (§ 45-622). But for the calls, the threats and the misstatements, the detailed conduct rules are federal, in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The phrase “debt collector” does not appear anywhere in the thirty-two Nebraska chapters held for this tab.
These come up constantly in association disputes. In Nebraska they don’t work the way people assume — but the right people are reaching for usually exists somewhere else.
Nebraska has no comprehensive act governing homeowners’ associations — no chapter setting out governance, budgets, elections, records or fines for a non-condominium community. Across the thirty-two chapters held for this tab, the phrase “homeowners association” in either spelling appears in just eight sections: the five of the Municipal Custodianship Act, the short-term-rental section, the real-estate licensing definitions, and § 52-2001 — with a ninth, § 39-1405 above, using the singular “homeowner association”.
What binds you is your recorded declaration, § 52-2001 for the assessment lien — and read its subsection (11) first, because it reaches only a private group of fee simple owners of residential real estate — and the Nebraska Nonprofit Corporation Act if the association is incorporated, which is where governance actually comes from: meetings, notice, quorum, voting, directors and members’ records rights.
The usual answer is the date: the Nebraska Condominium Act for regimes created after January 1, 1984, the Condominium Property Act for those created before. That is right as far as it goes, and it is not the whole answer.
§ 76-826(a) applies a named list of the newer act’s sections to pre-1984 condominiums as well — and § 76-874, the lien for assessments, is on that list. Those sections reach only events and circumstances occurring after January 1, 1984, and do not invalidate what is already in an older condominium’s master deed, bylaws or plans. § 76-824.01 states the same carry-back from the older act’s own side and adds the override: it applies “notwithstanding any provisions to the contrary in sections 76-801 to 76-824”.
So an older Nebraska condominium sits inside the modern lien scheme while the rest of the modern act passes it by — and the older act’s own lien provisions are still there underneath. § 76-817 makes unpaid common expenses a recorded lien on the co-owner’s interest, § 76-818 requires them to be paid out of the sale price on a conveyance, and § 76-819 makes the purchaser jointly and severally liable with the seller. On an older condominium the lien question is answered by both acts, not by one.
Nebraska protects access to solar and wind energy, and § 66-909 defines a solar agreement as a right — “whether or not stated in the form of a restriction, easement, covenant, or condition” — in a deed, will or other instrument executed by a person to insure adequate access of a solar energy system to solar energy. That is a way to acquire a right from a neighbour by agreement and record it. It is not a statute voiding a covenant that bans solar panels, and none of the chapters held for this tab contains one. If your declaration restricts solar, these sections do not override it.
Where they do bite is against the public side: § 66-914 authorises a county or municipality to grant a variance or exception where a zoning or subdivision rule would prevent or unduly restrict a solar or wind system, and § 66-912.02 provides that no interest in a wind or solar resource may be severed from the surface estate.
Nebraska’s open-government statutes (Neb. Rev. Stat. ch. 84, which is not reproduced on this tab) run against public bodies. Nothing in the thirty-two chapters held here gives a member a public-records-style right against a private association. The right people are reaching for is a corporate one: under the Nebraska Nonprofit Corporation Act a member may inspect and copy records on at least five business days’ written notice, with a second tier — accounting records among them — open on further conditions, and a route to a court-ordered inspection (§§ 21-19,165 to 21-19,168).
For an assessment balance specifically there is something better and faster: § 52-2001(7) makes the association furnish a recordable statement of unpaid assessments within ten business days of a written request, and that statement then binds the association and its board.
General information, not legal advice. Statutory text throughout this tab is reproduced from the Nebraska Revised Statutes as published by the Nebraska Legislature and may not reflect the most recent amendments. The absence statements on this page were tested by full-text search against the thirty-two chapters held for this tab — thirty-two of Nebraska’s eighty-nine — not against the whole statutes.