Miscellaneous & related West Virginia laws
Beyond the common-interest, condominium, nonprofit-corporation, and fair-housing acts, a few other West Virginia laws can bear on a community and its members — solar rights, the corporate code your association runs on, and debt collection — plus a couple of things people often get wrong.
HOPB hosts the full text of the West Virginia statutes that most affect homeowners' and condominium associations — you'll find them all on the West Virginia HOA laws hub. This page covers the edges: a handful of scattered provisions that can reach a community, and a short list of citations people commonly get wrong.
Because these are scattered provisions we don't reproduce in full, each entry below is a brief plain-language summary with its citation; the official text is available from the West Virginia Legislature.
A few things worth getting right.
These come up constantly in association disputes. In West Virginia they don't work the way people assume — the rights people are reaching for usually exist, just under a different law, and one common citation is now simply out of date.
West Virginia's Freedom of Information Act applies only to a “public body” — state, county, and city government, school and special districts, municipal corporations, and any body created by or primarily funded by state or local government (§ 29B-1-2). The Open Governmental Proceedings Act's open-meeting rules likewise reach only a “public agency” and its governing body — a unit of state, county, or municipal government exercising executive or legislative power (§ 6-9A-2). A private homeowners' or condominium association is funded by member assessments, not public funds, and isn't a government body, so you can't use FOIA or the open-meetings law to force records or meetings from your board. The rights you're reaching for come instead from your association-records rights under the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act (§ 36B-3-118) and the Nonprofit Corporation Act (§ 31E-15-1502), the meeting-notice and agenda requirements (§ 36B-3-108), and your community's recorded declaration and bylaws.
West Virginia's Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act is comprehensive, but it does not reach every community. It applies in full to communities created after July 1, 1986 (§ 36B-1-201), with carve-outs: a small planned community (12 or fewer units, no development rights) or a limited-expense one (average annual common expense at or below $300, adjusted) is subject to only a handful of sections (§ 36B-1-203), as are small cooperatives (§ 36B-1-202). And a community created before July 1, 1986 is governed only by an enumerated subset of the act — including the assessment lien and records rules — applied prospectively (§ 36B-1-204). If your community falls outside the act, its governance runs on the recorded declaration, the older Unit Property Act (for pre-1986 condominiums), and the Nonprofit Corporation Act.
West Virginia recodified its civil-rights laws into Chapter 16B. The old § 5-11A (the Fair Housing Act) and § 5-11 (the Human Rights Commission) are now repealed, and many older websites and documents still cite them. The current, active law is the West Virginia Fair Housing Act at § 16B-18-1 et seq., and the West Virginia Human Rights Commission now sits at § 16B-17. The protections didn't change — only the citation did — but if you're relying on a § 5-11A reference, update it to Chapter 16B.
General information, not legal advice. The laws summarized here are scattered provisions HOPB does not reproduce in full; for the official current text, see the West Virginia Code. Always confirm the current law and how it applies to your situation.