Indiana bill would have fenced every HOA retention pond
Indiana bill would have fenced every HOA retention pond
2026-09-10 · Indiana · Legislation · Did not pass
What happened — and did not. Senator J.D. Ford filed Senate Bill 69 in the 2025 session. It would have obliged every Indiana homeowners association to fence the entire perimeter of any pond it owns or maintains. It was referred to committee on 8 January 2025, was never given a hearing, and died when the session adjourned.1
This is not law and never was. We are covering it because retention ponds are close to universal in Indiana subdivisions, and because a proposal of this shape tends to return.
The text
The bill would have added a new section to IC 32-25.5:
“A homeowners association shall erect a barrier that: (1) is at least four (4) feet in height; and (2) surrounds the perimeter of a retention pond or other pond or lake that is located on property owned or maintained by the homeowners association or owned in common by the members of the homeowners association.”
Read the second clause carefully. The obligation attaches to water “owned or maintained” by the association, or owned in common by members. That is broader than it first appears — it reaches ponds an association does not own but has assumed maintenance responsibility for, an extremely common Indiana arrangement where stormwater infrastructure was platted to the association after development.
How it died
Quietly, and in the most ordinary way available. First reading on 8 January 2025, referred to the Committee on Local Government, and no substantive action ever after. The legislature's own records carry it as dead. It received no hearing, no committee vote, and no amendment.
That is the fate of the large majority of bills filed in any Indiana session, and it carries no implication about the merits. A bill dies unheard because a committee chair did not schedule it, which can reflect opposition, indifference, a crowded calendar, or a decision to let a subject develop for a year.
What it would have cost, and why that probably decided it
The drafting is one sentence. The obligation is not.
A four-foot barrier around the full perimeter of a typical suburban retention basin is a substantial capital item, and Indiana associations own thousands of them. For an association with two or three basins, this is a project measured in tens of thousands of dollars — funded by special assessment, since no reserve study written before 2025 contemplated it.
There are second-order effects that a one-sentence mandate does not address, and any board that has managed a wet basin will recognise them:
- Maintenance access. Basins need mowing, outlet clearing, sediment removal and periodic dredging. A continuous perimeter fence requires gates, and gates require a keying and access regime shared with contractors.
- Drainage easements. Most Indiana basins sit inside recorded drainage easements, frequently with a county drainage board or municipal MS4 programme holding rights. Erecting a structure inside such an easement is not always the association's decision to make alone.
- Aesthetics and property values. Basins are routinely platted as amenity features, with walking paths and sightlines that a perimeter fence eliminates.
- Liability, in both directions. A fence that is installed and then poorly maintained — a gate left open, a section down — can be worse for an association than no fence, because it establishes a standard the association then fails to meet.
None of that means the safety concern is not real. Drownings in stormwater basins are a genuine hazard and the motivation for the bill is not obscure. It means the policy question is harder than the drafting suggests, which is a common reason a bill sits.
What Indiana associations can do in the absence of a mandate
The absence of a statute is not the absence of exposure. Premises liability does not require a statutory duty, and an association that knows of a hazard and does nothing is in a worse position than one that documented a considered response.
- Establish who actually owns and who maintains each body of water. Pull the plat and the declaration. Boards are frequently wrong about this, in both directions.
- Document a considered safety decision in the minutes. Signage, depth markers, safety equipment, vegetation management, ice warnings. The record that the board considered the question is itself protective.
- Check the insurance. Confirm the master policy covers the water feature and read the exclusions. Some general liability forms treat bodies of water restrictively.
- Do not assume fencing is the safest option. It is one option among several, and it is the most expensive and the most maintenance-dependent.
Will it come back?
We will not predict that. What we can report is the pattern: HB 1401, which died unheard in the same 2025 session, returned in 2026 and became law almost verbatim. A bill dying in committee in Indiana is frequently the first draft of something enacted a year or two later, and a filed bill establishes a text that a later session can pick up.
What is verifiable about 2027 as of today is limited and we will state it plainly rather than speculate. Indiana's legislative site has no 2027 session container yet, so nothing has been pre-filed. The Legislative Council's binding 2026 interim resolution assigned no HOA, condominium, property-management or housing-covenant topic to any interim study committee — we searched the full text for each of those terms and found nothing. So there is no interim study process currently developing a successor to this bill.
What to watch
Pre-filing for the 2027 long session opens around Organization Day in mid-November 2026. That is the first moment a successor to SB 69 could appear, and the first moment anyone can say anything factual about the 2027 agenda.
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