No Kansas interim committee is studying HOA law before the 2027 session
No Kansas interim committee is studying HOA law before the 2027 session
2026-09-10 · Kansas · Legislation
Kansas legislators spend the months between sessions studying subjects they intend to legislate on. Community association law is not one of them this year. The Legislative Research Department's published roster of 2026 interim committees, which is the operative list of what is being examined before the 2027 session convenes, contains no committee, task force or study topic addressing homeowners associations, condominiums, common interest communities or restrictive covenants.1
That is a forecast, not an editorial. In Kansas, the interim calendar is where next session's bills are drafted.
What is on the calendar
Eleven statutory joint committees are meeting: Administrative Rules and Regulations; Child Welfare System Oversight; Corrections and Juvenile Justice Oversight; Fiduciary Financial Institutions Oversight; Home and Community Based Services and KanCare Oversight; Information Technology; Kansas Security; Legislative Budget; Pensions, Investments and Benefits; Special Claims Against the State; and State Building Construction.
Seven special or standing committees are meeting: Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications; the Kansas Board of Emergency Medical Services; Sexually Violent Predator Treatment Program Reform; the House Committee on Government Oversight; Statewide Trade Licensing; the Vehicle Services Modernization Task Force; and Application and Eligibility for Public Assistance Programs.
Four further bodies round out the list: the Capitol Preservation Committee, the Health Care Stabilization Fund Oversight Committee, the Education Funding Task Force, and the Water Program Task Force.
The two that come closest, and why neither counts
Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications is the nearest thing to a solar committee. Its subject is utility regulation — interconnection, rates, generation — not private covenants, and the three Kansas bills that would have limited association solar restrictions all went to local government committees, not to energy ones.
Statewide Trade Licensing is the nearest thing to a manager-licensing committee. Its subject is the trades. Kansas does not license community association managers, and nothing on the published charge suggests that is being examined.
What this means for the 2027 session
Bills can be and are introduced without an interim study. Every Kansas association bill of the last three years arrived that way — SB 144 from an individual senator, HB 2669 from a committee at a member's request, HB 2268 and HB 2733 from the House Local Government committee. So the absence of a study is not a bar.
What it does predict is the shape of what arrives. A bill with no interim work behind it comes in without a staff report, without a compiled record of stakeholder positions, and without a committee that has already spent a summer on the subject. It gets one hearing if it gets any, and it lives or dies on whether a chair schedules a vote. That is precisely what happened to all four recent bills.
For a Kansas board planning its 2027, the practical implications are three.
Assume the statutory framework is stable for another year. The Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill of Rights Act was not amended in 2025 or 2026, no HOA-specific statute changed, and nothing on the interim calendar is pointed at it. Governing-document reviews, reserve policy and enforcement practice can be planned against current law without hedging for a statutory change in the spring.
The pressure is coming from outside the statehouse, not inside it. The changes that actually reached Kansas associations this year came from municipal preemption bills aimed at cities, from federal mortgage underwriting standards, from a federal beneficial-ownership rule, and from the property insurance market. None of those runs through an interim committee, and none of them will show up on a legislative tracker.
If you want an interim study, ask early. Interim topics are approved by the Legislative Coordinating Council on legislator requests. An association sector that wants Kansas to examine manager licensing, reserve requirements, or a dispute-resolution mechanism has to persuade a member to make that request before the topics are set — not after a bill has already failed.
The structural point underneath
Kansas has roughly 2,000 community associations housing around 156,000 people, and no agency, no interim committee and no standing subject-matter committee dedicated to them. Association law here is made in the gaps of housing bills and land-use preemptions, which is why the most consequential sentence of the 2026 session for Kansas boards was a savings clause in a zoning statute.
What to watch next
Watch the Legislative Coordinating Council's topic approvals for the 2027 interim, which will be set next summer. A named HOA or common-interest-community topic on that list would be the first real signal in years that the Legislature intends to take the subject up systematically rather than incidentally.
And watch prefiling in December. Kansas bills prefiled ahead of a session are the earliest visible sign of what a member intends, and it is where a fourth solar bill would first appear.
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