2026-09-10 · Kentucky · Legislation · Did not pass

What happened. Senate Bill 9, the Kentucky General Assembly's 2026 housing omnibus, passed the Senate 35-2 and the House 71-21, went to a conference committee when the two chambers could not agree on the House version, and died there on the last day of the session. It is not law. Three sections of it would have amended Kentucky's community-association statutes, and all three fell with the bill.

The conference committee report is one page, and it resolves nothing. Of the four boxes a conference report can check — House concur, Senate recede, Senate concur, House recede — none is marked. The X sits in the fifth box: “Cannot agree.”¹

How a bill that passed both chambers ends up dead

SB 9 was filed on 2 February 2026 by Senators Robby Mills, Jimmy Higdon, Matt Deneen and Amanda Mays Bledsoe. As introduced it was a local-finance bill: it would have let local governments create residential infrastructure development districts and housing development districts, issue bonds, levy special assessments, and pay incentives to developers who build in them.

The Senate reported it with a committee substitute on 11 February and passed it 35-2 on 17 February. It reached the House on 18 February and sat in Local Government for six weeks.

On 1 April the House committee reported it with House Committee Substitute 1 — a rewrite that grew the bill to sixty pages and absorbed the substance of several other housing bills that had gone nowhere on their own. The House passed that version 71-21 the same day.

The Senate then refused to concur in the House substitute on 14 April. The House refused to recede from it. A conference committee was appointed in both chambers that day. It filed its report on 15 April 2026 — and the 2026 Regular Session adjourned sine die the same day.

The three sections that concerned associations

The House substitute is where the association provisions entered. Sections 12, 13 and 14 amended the two statutes that govern Kentucky's community associations.²

Section 12 amended the Planned Community Act's definitions at KRS 381.785, and it made two changes to what counts as a “planned community.” It inserted a size floor into the definition itself — today the statute reads “a group of residential dwellings,” and the substitute would have made it “a group of five (5) or more residential dwellings.” It then added a third item to the list of things a planned community is not:

“Any group of individual lots that would otherwise be required to comply with KRS 381.785 to 381.801, but which has four (4) or fewer individual lots in the group.”

Belt and braces for the same result: the smallest groupings would have dropped out of the Act entirely, rather than merely being excused from parts of it.

Sections 13 and 14 carried the text of Senate Bill 233 — a separate bill that had already passed the Senate 34-0 and then stalled in the House — at a slightly higher threshold. Each added an identical subsection (4), exempting associations for planned communities of fifteen or fewer lots (KRS 381.794) and condominiums of fifteen or fewer units (KRS 381.9197) from the statutory financial-record and financial-report requirements, with a voluntary opt-in.

None of this took effect. The financial-reporting tiers in both statutes are unchanged, and the definition of “planned community” in KRS 381.785 is unchanged.

1. SB 9 Conference Committee Report 1, filed 15 April 2026 — "Cannot agree" ↩
2. SB 9 House Committee Substitute 1, 1 April 2026 — full text, sections 12, 13, 14 and 18 ↩
3. SB 9, Kentucky General Assembly 2026 Regular Session — bill record and complete action history ↩
4. SB 9 vote history — Senate passage 35-2, 17 February 2026 ↩
5. SB 233 — the standalone association bill whose text became sections 13 and 14 ↩
6. KRS 381.785, Definitions for KRS 381.785 to 381.801 (current text, unamended) ↩