Senate takes step to reduce regulatory barriers to housing developments

CHEYENNE — Communities across the state are lacking in workforce housing, defined as homes affordable to middle-income people.

Experts cite many reasons for Wyoming’s housing crisis, and an overregulated environment for builders is among them. In 2023, local residents protested and ultimately derailed a plan by a Cheyenne developer who wanted to build an apartment complex with exercise facilities, a swimming pool and up to 195 units as workforce housing. Following a zoning protest that spurred a required supermajority City Council vote, those apartments were never built.

Current state law requires that only 20% of owners in the area sign a protest petition to a local development that could include apartment complexes, but on Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed Senate File 40, “Zoning protest petition- amendments.”

SF 40 would increase the number of neighboring residents who must sign a protest petition from 20% to 50%, and would also require those neighbors to “demonstrate a concrete and particularized harm” from a proposed development. The bill would also change the requirement that, upon receipt of a protest petition, a governing body like a local city council would have to pass the zoning change by a three-quarters vote to a simple majority.

Last year in Laramie, a planned development smaller than the one in Cheyenne, but that still would have provided workforce housing, stalled because of a similar zoning protest.

“This past summer, a small number of landowners were objecting to a zoning change for a multi-unit apartment building in downtown,” Mike Martin with the Wyoming Community Development Authority (WCDA) said. “A very small number had brought the protest, which met the statute.”

The Laramie City Council was not able to pass the zoning change by a supermajority, meaning the project did not move forward. Despite sometimes local opposition to apartment complexes, WCDA says multi-family units and apartments are one proposed solution for creating more stock in Wyoming’s affordable housing market.

In public testimony Thursday, Renny McKay, who has served as president of the Wyoming Business Alliance for just under a year, said the focus on housing this session is “so important.” McKay previously served as a policy director for Gov. Mark Gordon.

“As I’ve talked to our members and businesses across the state, their biggest challenge is workforce,” McKay said. “The worst stories that we hear are when a business offers someone a job — and this has happened in this county — we’ve had businesses offer people jobs, those people accept the salary and they love that opportunity to come here. But then they cannot find a house, so they turn the job down.”

Sen. Mike Gierau, D-Jackson, said SF 40 originated within the Regulatory Reduction Task Force, which cannot sponsor legislation, but was created by Gordon in 2023 to root out overregulation from state law.

“The thought was that one large landowner could stymie a subdivision, and this is trying to ease that regulation,” Gierau said.

According to WCDA, current production rates leave the state 389 to 2,179 housing units short of projected needs per year. WCDA, which released a statewide strategic plan this month, says that 20,000-38,000 units need to be produced across Wyoming in the next 10 years based on anticipated population changes.

Reducing regulatory barriers to development has been discussed at nearly every WCDA meeting on the statewide strategic plan since last summer.

“This bill is … a balance of everyone’s property rights,” said Cindy DeLancey, who sat on the Regulatory Reduction Task Force. She added that the bill would only apply to protests filed past July 1.

“We are in a housing crisis in Wyoming, and we are trying to find some avenues to address the concerns as we grapple with some of our land-use issues,” DeLancey said.

Dan Dorsch with the Southeast Wyoming Builders Association told senators that his organization supports SF 40.

“There have been projects shut down by this protest petition,” Dorsch said. “The one here in Cheyenne, a SWBA member was going to build a 200-apartment luxury apartment complex, a petition was filed and moved forward to city council and it lost 7-3. Had it not been for the supermajority requirement, it would have passed.”