¶ C01
Overview
The Act and this appendix. The Uniform Law Commission approved the Uniform Trust Decanting Act at its annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, July 10–16, 2015. The Act gives a fiduciary who holds a discretionary power to distribute principal a statutory power to distribute trust property to a second trust or to modify the terms of the first trust. It surrounds that power with notice, beneficiary protections and tax limits. Chapter 17 examines the Act, the common law and the principal state statutes; chapter 18 examines the tax consequences of decanting (see supra chs. 17–18). This appendix reproduces the black-letter text of each section and follows it with a short annotation.
Source of the text. The statutory text is taken from the Commission's official text of the Act, printed without the prefatory note and comments, in the version dated May 17, 2018, as reproduced in committee materials of the Kentucky General Assembly. Bracketed words and sections are the Commission's: they mark language an enacting state is to adapt, such as the length of the notice period or the officer who enforces charitable interests, and provisions a state may omit. The Legislative Notes are summarized in the annotations and are not reproduced, and neither are the official comments. Chapter 17 quoted the Act from the West Virginia and Maine enactments, which follow its text (see supra ¶ 1730). The section and paragraph numbers given in this appendix are those of the official text.
Enactment. Enacting states include West Virginia, W. Va. Code §§ 44D-8B-1 to -30; Maine, Me. Rev. Stat. Ann. tit. 18-B, §§ 1201–1229 (2021 Me. Laws c. 235); Wisconsin, Wis. Stat. § 701.1301 et seq. (2023 Wis. Act 127); and Vermont, Vt. Stat. Ann. tit. 14A, §§ 1401–1429 (2024 Vt. Acts & Resolves No. 177, effective July 1, 2024). Maine and Vermont renumber the sections; West Virginia follows the uniform numbering. Many states had decanting statutes before 2015 and kept them, among them New York, Alaska, Delaware, South Dakota, Nevada and Ohio, whose statutes are compared in chapter 17 (see supra ¶ 1760).
How the annotations are arranged. Each annotation states what the section does, notes the principal non-uniform statutes that treat the same point differently, and gives the chapter of this treatise in which the section is discussed.