James City County, VA HOA Rules: Assessment & Dues (2026)

James City County does not have a general HOA financial-oversight ordinance, but Chapter 19, Subdivisions, controls how an association's assessment authority gets created in the first place. Sec. 19-70 applies to any major subdivision where common area is reserved for recreation, conservation or other shared purposes, or where maintenance responsibility falls to homeowners. Before a single lot in such a subdivision can be approved, recorded, sold or used, the developer must execute HOA documents in a form the county attorney signs off on. Those documents must set out five things, and subsection (d) is the assessment rule: the method of assessing the individual property for its share of the cost of adequately administering, maintaining and replacing the common property.

In practice, Community Development's planning staff will not clear a final plat for a subdivision with shared amenities, private streets or stormwater features until the recorded declaration shows how dues are calculated, not just that dues exist. The same assessment-disclosure logic appears in Sec. 19-73(d)(2) for shared driveways in minor subdivisions, and Sec. 19-66(b) requires the HOA, or other legal entity, to cover streetlight operating costs on private streets, again subject to the county attorney's satisfaction that a functioning entity exists. Sec. 19-69(b) lets a developer avoid separately dedicating park land if adequate land is instead transferred to the association, reinforcing that the assessment structure has to be real enough to fund what the association takes on. The ordinance traces to Ord. No. 30A-27 (1999) and was last amended by Ord. No. 30A-42 in 2013.