The HOA fuel-source bill died at 10:16 p.m. on the last night
The HOA fuel-source bill died at 10:16 p.m. on the last night
2026-09-10 · Indiana · Legislation · Did not pass
What happened. Most bills that die in the Indiana General Assembly die quietly, unheard, in a committee they were referred to in January. House Bill 1389 of 2025 did not. It passed the House 90-6, passed the Senate 36-13, went to a conference committee, came back with a negotiated report — and then the Senate voted down its own conference report 17-33 at 10:16 p.m. on 24 April 2025, with the session due to adjourn in three hours.1
This bill did not become law. Its substance did, eleven months later, in a different bill — which is what makes the failure worth reading rather than filing.
What HB 1389 would have done
The operative language named homeowners associations directly:
“a unit, neighborhood association, or homeowners association may not adopt or enforce an ordinance, order, regulation, resolution, policy, or similar measure that: (1) prohibits or restricts the use, sale, or lease of a motor vehicle or outdoor equipment; (2) distinguishes between motor vehicles or outdoor equipment; or (3) results in differing regulatory standards for motor vehicles or outdoor equipment; based on the fuel source that powers the motor vehicle or outdoor equipment.”
In plain terms: an association could not write a covenant that treated an electric vehicle differently from a petrol one, or banned a battery-powered mower while permitting a petrol one, or the reverse. The bill also carried an unrelated airport-overlay-zoning rider, which is the sort of passenger that often decides a bill's fate for reasons having nothing to do with its main subject.
The sequence of the collapse
- 17 February 2025 — passes the House, 90-6.
- 15 April 2025 — passes the Senate, 36-13, with a floor amendment.
- 16 April 2025 — the House dissents from the Senate's amendments. A conference committee is appointed.
- 24 April 2025 — the conference committee files Conference Committee Report #1. The House adopts it 68-23.
- 24 April 2025, 10:16 p.m. — the Senate rejects the same report, 17-33.
- 25 April 2025, 1:38 a.m. — the General Assembly adjourns sine die. A last-ditch House motion to concur in the Senate's position was filed and never acted on.
A bill with 90 House votes and 36 Senate votes behind it ended the session as nothing at all.
Why the near-miss matters more than the miss
Because the language came back and passed. In the 2026 short session, the fuel-source provision reappeared in substantially the same form — bundled this time with flag-display protections and a ban on association-operated licence plate readers — as House Bill 1150. That bill was signed on 24 February 2026 and its provisions took effect on 1 July 2026.
So an Indiana association reading this now is not reading about a policy that failed. It is reading about a rule that is currently in force, which spent a year one Senate vote away from arriving twelve months earlier.
The lesson about Indiana legislative process
Three features of the Indiana General Assembly show up clearly in this record, and they are worth internalising if you track bills that affect your community.
A conference report is a single up-or-down vote in each chamber, and either chamber can kill it. By the time a bill reaches conference, the version being voted on is not the version either chamber passed. Senators who voted yes in April on the Senate's own amended text voted no eight days later on the negotiated compromise. Both votes are consistent; they were votes on different documents.
The clock is a participant. Indiana's constitution caps the long session, and the last night compresses dozens of conference reports into a few hours. A report rejected at 10:16 p.m. has no realistic path to renegotiation before adjournment at 1:38 a.m. Timing is not incidental to the outcome; it often is the outcome.
Riders travel with the vehicle. HB 1389 carried airport-overlay zoning alongside the HOA provision. We cannot say from the record which component drew the Senate's objection, and we are not going to guess. But an association tracking a bill for one provision should read the whole bill, because the provision it cares about will live or die with the rest of the package.
What the eventual outcome means for a board
Since 1 July 2026 the fuel-source rule is Indiana law, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not accomplish, because it is widely mischaracterised.
- It is a neutrality rule, not an installation mandate. It stops an association from discriminating by fuel source. It does not, by itself, give an owner a right to install charging equipment, allocate common-element electrical capacity, or require the association to permit a particular installation.
- Indiana has no separate “right to charge” statute. We looked specifically, and we could not find one. Claims circulating on vendor and installer websites that Indiana enacted an EV-charging mandate for associations effective January 2026 do not match any bill we could locate, and they conflict with the enrolled text of what actually passed. Treat that claim as unsupported.
- It reaches outdoor equipment too — mowers, blowers, trimmers — which is the half most associations have not thought about, and the half most likely to appear in an existing rulebook.
The audit worth doing
Pull your rules and architectural guidelines and search for any provision that turns on what powers a thing. Bans on “gas-powered” equipment before certain hours. Charging-cord prohibitions written to reach only electric vehicles. Parking rules distinguishing vehicle types by drivetrain. Each is now exposed, and each is fixable by board action in an evening.
What to watch
Whether the fuel-source provision is tested in an Indiana court. It is new law with no interpretive gloss, and the boundary between a prohibited fuel-source distinction and a permissible neutral rule — noise limits, storage requirements, electrical-safety standards — is exactly the kind of line that gets drawn in litigation rather than in drafting.
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