It is quite common that a community belong to a mancomunity and has to pay mancomunity fees. In fact, most of urbanization are composed of a group of communities and another group of individual houses and both of them will have their own coefficients in the mancomunity and the obligation to pay fees for the maintenance of the roads, gardens, lamp posts and to pay the staff, electricity, water, etc..
Mancomunities exist as a formula to avoid the obligation for the Town Hall to provide with many services to the urbanization, such as cleaning, gardening, lightning, water, and so on. The responsibility could be for mancomunities or “ Entidades Urbanísticas de Conservación”
In the municipal urban plan of every town it is regulated how new urbanization will have to be maintain. In a some cases, it is established that the City hall will get this responsibility once the urbanization is finished and accepted. In others, it is approved that the urbanization will have to be maintained by the owners through a Entidad Urbanistica de Conservación ( EUC) that will have to be constituted once the developer finishes the urbanization and it is receptioned by the Town Hall. Mancomunities arises in most of cases because the developer does not finish in full the urbanization and consequently it is not accepted by the Town Hall or because it is not fully constituted the EUC, so the mancomunity of owners of the urbanization are the ones responsible for the maintenance until it is accepted by the Town Hall or the EUC is constituted.
The payments to the mancomunity are regulated according of the statutes of the mancomunity or the coefficients approved by the Town Hall.
The mancomunity works as a community, following the horizontal property law and will approve the yearly budget to be shared among the individual owners and comunities. The problem arises when a community wants to be out of the mancomunity so that there would be no obligation to go on paying the fees.
There could be several reasons for this decision: The Town Hall has accepted to provide with some services to the urbanization and the community does not want to receive anything else from the mancomunity or they just consider that the services received do not worth the fees paid or the community wants to pay for the maintenance of part of the roads or the garden near the community but not for the maintenance of other areas that does not give any benefit to the community, etc.
In some cases the community is just in the border of the urbanization and does not receive any benefit for being part of the mancomunity. The feeling is that they are paying for the benefit of others. It is quite common in communities in the limits of the urbanization that as a consequence of the developing of a neighbour area, the access to the community is not anymore through the urbanization´s roads but through this new infrastructure besides the community, so they consider that it would not be fair to go on paying for nothing.
Should the community want just to end up with the payment of the fees, the mancomunity would be able to take the community to court and the community will not be able to argue in this claiming court procedure that he does not want to be part of the mancomunity.
The only way for the community to finish with the obligation to pay its mancomunity fees would be getting a court resolution saying that this community will not be part of the mancomunity anymore.
At this respect there have been many cases in which a community has tried to be out of the mancomunity, but as far as I know, except the cases of some funny mancomunities or when the mancomunity is legally dissolved, I am afraid that all the court resolutions have denied the possibility of the communities to be out of the mancomunities so that they can avoid their fees.
The reason is clear. The mancomunity has some obligation with the staff and suppliers that are providing services to the mancomunity and it would not be fair that some of the members of the mancommunity could decide by themselves to be exempted from this obligation.
The communities in the mancomunity have a say in the general assembly of the mancomunity and it will be in this meetings when the majority of members and coefficients can decide the budget and the services they want to provide in the urbanization. Taking all of this into consideration, be aware that cutting of the payment of the fees without any agreement from the mancomunity or a prior court resolution can resulted in a court claiming from the mancomunity and a sentence to pay the outstanding fees plus the legal cost.