North Carolina List Most likely Legislators to Help

A Prioritized List of North Carolina General

Assembly law makers that are most likely to

sponsor and get passed “real” HOA Reform

legislation proposed by HOA reform advocates

Background

ChatGPT was used as a tool to produce the said list. Inputs to ChatGPT included

Goal(s), Context, Persona, Audience, Constraints and Output Control, and Prompt(s).

Content in this communication is based on the following Prompt:

For members of the North Carolina HOA reform Website, HOA Accountability Project:

NC, who live throughout North Carolina, provide a recommend, prioritized list of North

Carolina General Assembly law makers that are most likely to sponsor and get passed

“real” HOA Reform legislation proposed by homeowners or HOA reform advocates.

Address what draft bill of the following homeowner-centered draft, bill-ready North

Carolina HOA reform bills should have priority for the 2027 session and why:

1. HOA Records and Open Meetings Transparency Act

2. Homeowner Choice/50% HOA Cap

3. Prohibition on Donations and Political Expenditures

4. HOA Termination/Transition Act

5. HOA Consumer-Protection Office Within the DOJ

Bases for List and Timing Qualification

Lawmakers in the list are based on the best combination of (1) demonstrated

willingness to sponsor Homeowners Association (HOA) legislation, (2) majority-party or

leadership influence, (3) relevant committee positions, and (4) ability to get a bill through

both chambers rather than merely file it.

Important timing qualification: The list is a provisional September 8, 2026, ranking

based on the 2025-2026 General Assembly. Members are elected for new terms in

November, and the new General Assembly organizes in January 2027; committee

assignments and leadership can change. North Carolina General Statutes § 120-11.1

provides for organization of the new biennial session in January after the election. The

ranking needs to be redone immediately after the November 3 election and again

after the 2027 committee assignments are announced.

Recommended statewide priority list for prospective sponsors/champions

Priority Legislator Why to target this legislator Best role

1 Sen. Todd Johnson

(R), District 35

Primary sponsor of the original Senate Bill 378, HOA Revisions, which

passed the Senate 47-0; Senate Majority Whip; chair of Commerce and

Insurance; member of Finance and Rules. He combines demonstrated

HOA sponsorship with leadership access.

Preferred Senate lead sponsor

2 Sen. Benton G.

Sawrey (R), District

Primary sponsor of S378; serves on Judiciary and Rules and

Operations of the Senate and chairs Health Care. He has already

carried substantive HOA legislation through the Senate.

Senate lead/co-lead; especially

strong for detailed statutory

drafting

3 Sen. Vickie Sawyer

(R), District 37

Primary sponsor of S378; serves on Rules, Finance, Commerce and

Insurance, Regulatory Reform, and Appropriations/Base Budget. That is

a particularly useful committee network for getting a bill through multiple

stages.

Senate lead/co-lead

4 Sen. Michael V. Lee

(R), District 7

Senate Majority Leader; Appropriations/Base Budget chairman; Judiciary

and Rules member; voted for S378. He has less demonstrated HOA

sponsorship history than the first three, but substantially more

institutional leverage.

Leadership champion /

sponsor recruiter / possible

sponsor

5 Rep. Mitchell S.

Setzer (R), District

Speaker Pro Tempore and Senior Chairman of House Finance.

Importantly, the originally filed H444 identified Liu, Iler, and Setzer as

primary sponsors. His combination of prior HOA involvement and

House leadership makes him potentially much more consequential than

his name usually receives in HOA-reform discussions.

Potentially strongest House

leadership sponsor/champion

6 Rep. Frank Iler (R),

District 17

One of North Carolina's most persistent HOA bill sponsors: primary

sponsor of H444, H993, and H1174. H444 actually cleared Housing and

Development and Commerce and Economic Development before

stalling in Judiciary 1.

Experienced House co-lead and

institutional memory

7 Rep. Ya Liu (D),

District 21

Probably the strongest demonstrated House advocate on the issue: first

primary sponsor of H444, primary sponsor of H993 and H1174, and

primary sponsor of H1212. She is also a House Democratic Whip and

serves on Housing and Development and Judiciary 2.

Substantive House co-lead;

bipartisan pairing essential

8 Rep. Bill Ward (R),

District 5

Republican primary sponsor of the 2026 HOA Oversight Act, H1174;

serves on Appropriations, Judiciary 3, and State and Local Government.

Strong prospective Republican

House lead

9 Rep. Joseph Pike

(R), District 6

Republican primary sponsor of H1174; serves on Finance and State and

Local Government.

House co-lead

Priority Legislator Why to target this legislator Best role

10 Sen. Steve Jarvis

(R), District 30

Chairman of Senate Regulatory Reform. His S1047 became a vehicle

containing substantial HOA provisions on architectural decisions, fines,

liens, contracts and records. He also has a demonstrated record of

getting other regulatory bills enacted.

Particularly useful for a targeted

regulatory/transparency package

11 Sen. Jim Burgin (R),

District 12

Co-primary sponsor of S1051. That proposal is important precedent

because it expressly made conflicting HOA restrictions void, authorized

an owner civil remedy, and authorized the Attorney General to bring

an enforcement action.

Especially promising for the

DOJ enforcement bill

12 Rep. Julia C.

Howard (R), District

Co-sponsor of H1174 and Senior Chairman of House Finance. Her

institutional influence makes her especially important for legislation that

creates a state office or recurring appropriation.

Fiscal/appropriations champion

13 Rep. Jeffrey C.

McNeely (R),

District 84

H1174 sponsor; Appropriations member and several committee-chair

positions. His office has also demonstrated at least some willingness to

communicate with homeowner advocates, although that should not be

construed as endorsement of these bills.

Secondary House

sponsor/champion

14 Sen. Jay J.

Chaudhuri (D)

Senate Democratic Whip and Burgin's co-primary sponsor of S1051,

including the Attorney General enforcement provision.

Strong bipartisan Senate co

sponsor, particularly on

enforcement

15 Rep. Laura Budd

(D)

Primary sponsor with Iler and Liu of H993, the HOA Organization and

Reporting Act.

Transparency/reporting ally

Why Iler and Liu belong on the list – but not at the

very top

Frank Iler deserves substantial credit for persistence. H444, H993, and H1174

establish a real record of putting his name on HOA legislation. H444 was not merely

introduced and abandoned; it received favorable committee substitutes from two

committees before reaching Judiciary 1.

In The Charlotte Observer news article entitled “Nearly everyone agrees HOA laws

need work. So why do NC’s bills keep dying,” Iler emphasizes differences between six

home communities and 2,000-home communities and the “one size fits all” concern. He

also candidly acknowledges that legislative leadership and Rules can stop legislation

regardless of sponsorship.

Iler is a valuable experienced co-lead, but not someone HOA Accountability

Project should depend upon as its sole champion.

Ya Liu presents almost the reverse profile. Her sponsorship record indicates unusually

sustained willingness to propose actual restrictions on HOA authority: H444, H993,

H1174, and H1212. But she is presently in the House minority. Consequently, the

optimal arrangement is Liu plus a Republican House sponsor with leadership

access, rather than Liu carrying the legislation alone.

That is not partisan advocacy; it is a procedural assessment of the current General

Assembly.

The sponsor team to try building

For statewide advocates, stop looking for one HOA hero.

The evidence is unusually strong that one sponsor is insufficient. The original S378

passed the Senate 47-0 and still did not become HOA law. The said news article

emphasizes the same phenomenon: bipartisan and sometimes unanimous HOA bills

repeatedly fail before enactment.

Preferred 2027 formation would therefore be:

Senate core: Todd Johnson + Benton Sawrey + Vickie Sawyer, with Michael Lee as

leadership champion.

House core: Mitchell Setzer + Frank Iler + Ya Liu, with Bill Ward or Joseph Pike as an

additional Republican sponsor.

That combination deliberately provides Senate experience + House experience +

majority-party access + bipartisan ownership + Rules/Judiciary/Finance

connections.

For HOA Accountability Project: NC, the advantage of having members throughout

North Carolina is significant: rather than having one advocate contact all of these people

as a nonconstituent, identify members who actually live in Districts 35, 10, 37, 7, 89,

17, 21, 5, and 6 and have those constituents request the meetings. A statewide

organization can turn geographic dispersion into legislative leverage.

Which of the five model bills should be the 2027

flagship?

Priority No. 1 — HOA Records and Open Meetings

Transparency Act

Make the “HOA Records and Open Meetings Transparency Act” the single flagship bill

for the beginning of the 2027 long session.

Not because it is necessarily the most transformative of the five proposals, but because

it has the best combination of:

broad homeowner benefit + clear existing statutory problem + low conceptual

complexity + existing legislative precedent + relatively low fiscal cost + difficulty

for opponents to defend secrecy as a principle.

The statutory case is unusually straightforward.

Current G.S. § 47F-3-118 says that “all financial and other records” must be made

reasonably available to planned-community owners. The condominium counterpart,

G.S. § 47C-3-118, says substantially the same thing.

But those provisions incorporate Chapter 55A. G.S. § 55A-16-02(c) conditions

inspection of specified records on the member showing good faith, a “proper purpose,”

reasonable particularity, and a connection between the records and the stated purpose.

That creates exactly the sort of statutory friction that a bright-line HOA records statute

can eliminate.

The meetings statutes are similarly incomplete. G.S. §§ 47F-3-108(b) and 47C-3

108(b) currently require boards only “at regular intervals” to provide owners an

opportunity to attend a portion of an executive-board meeting and speak. They do not

establish the comprehensive open-meetings architecture that your proposed act

apparently seeks.

And politically, there is already substantial precedent. Original S378 gave owners

enhanced contract-inspection rights and passed the Senate 47-0. Senator Jarvis's later

S1047 likewise contained expanded association-contract inspection provisions.

Even Harmony Taylor, identified in the said news article as a former chair of the North

Carolina Community Associations Institute Legislative Action Committee, identified

clearer HOA-record-access requirements among reforms that could help.

That is strategically important: records transparency starts the 2027 debate on

ground where even industry representatives have acknowledged a legitimate

problem.

Why this defeats the “one size fits all” argument

A six-home HOA and a 2,000-home HOA may differ radically in budgets, amenities,

professional management, infrastructure, and reserves.

But the principle—

“An owner paying mandatory assessments should be able to see how those

assessments are being spent and observe the board making association

decisions, subject to narrow privacy protections”

—does not depend meaningfully on association size.

The mechanics can scale electronically. That makes transparency substantially easier to

defend as a statewide baseline than many operational mandates.

Priority No. 2 — HOA Consumer-Protection Office Within the

Department of Justice

I would make this the second bill and the enforcement companion to the

Transparency Act.

The central problem is already visible in H1174.

H1174 would require the North Carolina Department of Justice (DOJ) to collect HOA

complaints, transmit complaints to the opposing party, provide information, and publish

data. But its proposed subsection (e) expressly says DOJ may not promulgate HOA

governance regulations and “shall not serve as an arbiter” of HOA disputes.

That is the enforcement gap.

The said news article describes precisely this unresolved debate—legislators have

repeatedly considered Attorney General oversight or complaint systems while

questioning which agency should enforce the law.

Importantly, an enforcement role for the Attorney General is not some legally

unimaginable concept. Senators Burgin and Chaudhuri's S1051 expressly proposed

that:

“The Attorney General may bring an action on behalf of the State…”

to enforce its homeowner protections.

S1051 also appropriated money to DOJ for training, complaint intake, and enforcement

activity.

That provides HOA reformers with a powerful response when someone says “DOJ

cannot enforce private HOA law.”

The better formulation is:

The General Assembly has the authority to decide what HOA conduct violates

state law and to assign enforcement authority to the Attorney General. The policy

question is whether it chooses to do so.

Nevertheless, keep this bill separate from the Transparency Act initially. Combining

enforcement personnel, appropriations, complaint adjudication, records rules, open

meeting rules, and remedies into one large measure gives opponents more

opportunities to kill the entire package.

Pass transparency, if possible, even if the enforcement-office measure needs another

round.

Recommended order for all five bills

1. HOA Records and Open Meetings Transparency Act — 2027 flagship

Highest combination of importance and political feasibility.

It attacks the information imbalance that makes almost every other HOA problem harder

to discover. Owners cannot intelligently challenge assessments, contracts,

management-company relationships, reserves, litigation expenses, insurance decisions,

election procedures, or enforcement patterns if they cannot obtain the underlying

records or observe board action.

It also directly responds to complaints that the General Assembly itself proposed

tracking in S378 and H1174: access to records, access to board meetings, and

executive-board transparency.

2. HOA Consumer-Protection Office Within DOJ — enforcement companion

Potentially the most consequential long-term institutional reform.

A right without an economically practical enforcement mechanism can become a paper

right. But this bill carries a fiscal note, staffing questions, administrative-design

questions, and predictable institutional opposition. H1174's deliberately limited DOJ role

illustrates the political resistance that will be encountered.

This should therefore be pursued aggressively, but it is a somewhat harder first

enactment than transparency.

3. Prohibition on Donations and Political Expenditures

Attractive as a narrow second-wave bill, but it needs careful constitutional and

statutory vetting.

North Carolina already restricts corporate contributions to candidates and political

committees under G.S. § 163-278.19. So, the precise added value of the proposal

depends upon whether it addresses charitable donations, trade-association payments,

lobbying-related expenditures, independent expenditures, or other uses of compulsory

assessments.

There is also a significant legal drafting issue: a blanket state prohibition on a private

corporation's political speech or independent expenditures could implicate First

Amendment jurisprudence, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,

558 U.S. 310 (2010). This is not to say the draft is unconstitutional; Its exact scope

needs to be stress-tested before it becomes the flagship because an objective is

specifically to avoid creating a litigation magnet.

A carefully structured “mandatory assessments may not be used for specified non

association purposes without express owner authorization” model could present a

materially different legal question from an outright corporate-speech ban.

4. Homeowner Choice/50% HOA Cap

Potentially transformational, but politically much harder.

If, as the title suggests, the proposal prospectively limits the proportion of new housing

that may be placed into mandatory HOA structures, it attacks the problem upstream

rather than merely regulating HOAs after formation.

That is a major policy virtue.

That is also why one would expect much stronger opposition from development,

homebuilding, land-use, and local-government interests than for an HOA records bill.

The bill will invite questions about infrastructure ownership, stormwater facilities, private

roads, amenity maintenance, development approvals, and who assumes functions

otherwise assigned to associations.

That does not make it a bad bill. It makes it a structural reform better pursued after

the homeowner coalition demonstrates it can get a narrower statewide protection

enacted.

5. HOA Termination/Transition Act

Extremely important, but technically the most complicated of the five.

Existing North Carolina law already illustrates why. G.S. § 47F-2-118 requires at least

80% of planned-community votes to terminate unless the declaration requires more,

and then addresses common elements, sales, owners, creditors, and liens.

G.S. § 47C-2-118 does the same for condominiums but contains additional complexities

involving units, common elements, appraisal, sale proceeds, lienholders, and post

termination ownership.

A comprehensive transition regime also has to answer what happens to roads,

stormwater systems, ponds, private utilities, recreational facilities, easements,

insurance obligations, reserve assets, outstanding contracts, creditors, maintenance

obligations, and common property.

This is exactly the sort of proposal on which opponents can credibly raise technical—not

merely rhetorical—“unintended consequences” arguments unless every transition

pathway is completely worked out.

Continue developing it in 2027, but do not spend the coalition's first and greatest

political capital on it.

A two-track 2027 strategy

I would therefore recommend that HOA Accountability Project: NC go into the 2027

session with two clearly identified priorities rather than five equal asks:

Must-pass flagship:

HOA Records and Open Meetings Transparency Act

Institution-building companion:

HOA Consumer-Protection Office Within the DOJ

The other three should remain fully developed and available but presenting all five as

equal priorities risks recreating the problem of earlier statewide distribution: legislators

are confronted with a large reform program and have no clear indication what is most

needed for them to do first.

The message to legislators should be essentially:

“We have five bill-ready reforms. We are asking the 2027 General Assembly to

begin by enacting one fundamental statewide rule: homeowners have a right to

see the records and observe the decisions of an organization they are legally

obligated to fund. We also ask the General Assembly to create an effective state

consumer-protection mechanism, so those statutory rights do not depend on a

homeowner hiring private counsel.”

That is considerably harder to dismiss as an amorphous demand to “fix HOAs.”

One more strategic distinction: sponsors versus gatekeepers

HOA Accountability Project should maintain a second target list that is not a sponsor

list.

Under the present 2025-2026 structure, House Speaker Destin Hall, Senate

President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, House Rules Chairman John Bell IV, Senate

Rules Chairman Bill Rabon, and House Housing and Development Chairs Mark

Brody and Jeff Zenger can be crucial to whether legislation receives the necessary

consideration. Current House and Senate leadership is documented by the NCGA. The

House Housing and Development Committee is presently chaired by Brody and Zenger,

and H1174 was referred there before Appropriations and Rules.

One would not necessarily ask these legislators to be the principal sponsors. One

would ask the sponsor team to obtain their agreement—preferably before filing—that

the bill will receive a fair hearing.

That addresses perhaps the most important finding in the said news article: getting

legislators to agree with HOA reform is not the same thing as getting HOA reform

enacted. The said news article documents both widespread agreement that problems

exist and the repeated death of bills before final passage. homeowner advocates are

seeking basic statewide safeguards while the homeowner voice remains less organized

than the industry's legislative presence.

Overall recommendation

Advice for HOA Accountability Project: NC as a statewide organization

The first five political targets today should be:

Todd Johnson → Benton Sawrey → Vickie Sawyer → Michael Lee → Mitchell

Setzer.

Immediately bring Frank Iler and Ya Liu into the House coalition and not discard their

accumulated knowledge merely because previous bills failed.

The desired outcome should be something North Carolina HOA reform has generally

lacked:

a bicameral sponsor team before filing, rather than a bill looking for allies after

filing.

And among the five model bills, put the organization's name, energy, constituent

contacts, website, infographics, press outreach, and legislative meetings primarily

behind the HOA Records and Open Meetings Transparency Act for the opening of

the 2027 long session.

It is the best candidate for establishing a precedent that homeowner-generated

legislation can actually survive the General Assembly.

Prepared by Al Bennett September 8, 2026