Why an exclusion is the news

Most legislative coverage reports what a new law permits. Here the useful fact is what it does not reach, because the Act is genuinely significant everywhere else.

The Uniform Easement Relocation Act changes a long-standing default in property law. Traditionally, an easement's location is fixed and cannot be changed without the holder's agreement — which gives an easement holder an absolute veto over a landowner's development plans, however reasonable the proposed alternative. The Act replaces the veto with a judicial standard: a burdened owner can petition a court to relocate, subject to protections ensuring the holder is not materially harmed.

Applying that to a common-interest community would have been a substantial change. A declaration's easement scheme is the circulatory system of the community — drainage, utilities, access to common elements, the association's right to enter for maintenance. Opening each of those to individual, lot-by-lot judicial relocation would have made the scheme negotiable one parcel at a time.

The Legislature declined to do that, in one line.

The line the carve-out actually draws

The exclusion is written narrowly, and the wording repays attention: it covers an easement “created by a declaration in accordance with the provisions of chapter 116 of NRS.”

That is a statement about how the easement was created, not about who holds it or where the land is. So the questions for a Nevada owner or board are:

• Is the easement in the declaration? If yes, it is outside the Act.
• Is it a separately recorded easement — a utility company's easement predating the subdivision, a neighbour's recorded access easement, an easement granted by deed after the declaration was recorded? Those were not created by the declaration, and the carve-out does not obviously reach them, even though the land sits inside a common-interest community.

The practical consequence is that a lot inside a Nevada HOA may carry several easements with different answers. Anyone contemplating a relocation petition needs to know which instrument created the easement they want to move, and the recorded chain is the only place that answer lives.

Why this is more relevant in 2026 than it was in 2025

Two 2025 developments make lot-level building more common in Nevada, and both increase the number of people who will discover an easement in an inconvenient place:

Accessory dwelling units. AB 396 required Nevada's largest counties and cities to adopt ADU ordinances by July 1, 2026, and provided that a jurisdiction that did not adopt one authorises ADUs on residentially zoned parcels without restriction. An ADU is typically built in a rear yard — which is where drainage and utility easements run.

Rooftop solar. NRS 116.333 and 116.334 give owners a statutory shot clock and a cost cap on solar installation, which brings conduit runs, battery placement and inverter siting into play.

An owner who clears the architectural committee, clears the ordinance, and then finds an association drainage easement across the only viable location has, under AB 192, no new remedy. The route is the declaration's own process, or a negotiated recorded amendment with the association.

What it means for a board

The association's easement scheme is intact, and that is worth knowing before responding to an owner who claims otherwise. But the corollary is that the association is now the only route: an owner who needs an easement moved has to come to the board, and the board's answer is the final practical answer.

That is a position worth exercising with some care. A board with no process for considering a reasonable relocation request — at the owner's expense, with the association's engineering requirements met and the amendment recorded — is exercising a veto the Legislature has just removed from every other easement holder in Nevada.