What SB 152 would have done

As reported during the session, the bill would have permitted installation of electric-vehicle charging stations in exclusive-use areas and common areas without requiring a vote of the owners, and would have provided that installing and maintaining a charger in a common area is not a change in use, a commercial use, or a capital improvement.

Those three characterisations are the technical heart of the problem and explain why the bill mattered more than its length suggests. In a Nevada common-interest community, each of them is a separate obstacle:

• “Change in use” of a common element typically triggers governing-document procedures that a single owner cannot satisfy alone.
• “Commercial use” is prohibited outright by many declarations — and a charger that meters electricity invites the characterisation.
• “Capital improvement” engages the association's own capital-improvement machinery, including owner notice and in some cases approval, under provisions that exist to stop boards spending reserves without consent.

Without a statute saying otherwise, an owner in a Nevada condominium or townhome who wants a charger in an assigned parking space is arguing all three points from scratch, against a board with no obligation to answer on any particular timetable.

Who this actually affects

It is worth being precise, because the gap is not uniform.

A detached single-family home with its own garage in a planned community is usually fine. The charger is inside the owner's own structure, the electrical work is behind the wall, and no architectural question arises unless a conduit runs outside.

A condominium or townhome owner with an assigned or limited-common-element parking space is squarely in the gap. The space may be theirs to use exclusively, but the conduit, the panel capacity and the metering all touch shared infrastructure. This is the population the bill was written for, and it is the population with no statutory answer.

An owner in a community with unassigned or open parking has the weakest position of all, because there is no exclusive-use area to anchor a claim to.

Nevada is now an outlier among western states

Several states — California, Colorado, Florida and Oregon among them — have enacted statutory protections for EV charging in common-interest communities, typically on the same architecture Nevada just adopted for solar: the owner pays, the association may set reasonable standards, and it may not prohibit. Nevada's 2025 session produced that architecture and then applied it to one technology and not the other.

The contrast is sharper because SB 440 is not a minimal statute. It names a federal modelling tool, prices aesthetic compliance to the nearest percentage point, and resolves a dispute about animal guards. That level of drafting attention landed on panels, and none of it landed on chargers.

What an owner can do in the meantime

• Read the declaration for what it actually prohibits, rather than assuming. Many Nevada declarations restrict alterations to common elements without addressing chargers at all, which is a different starting point from an express ban.
• Frame the request as an architectural application under whatever process the governing documents provide. That is the only procedural hook available, and it at least generates a written record.
• Address the three characterisations up front — that it is not a change in use, not commercial, and not a capital improvement at the association's expense — because those are the grounds a denial will rest on.
• Offer the terms the solar statute requires for association-maintained roofs: a recorded agreement covering damage, removal, insurance naming the association as additional insured, indemnity, inspection rights and disclosure to buyers. Nothing compels a Nevada board to accept it for a charger, but it answers every legitimate objection a board has, in a form the Legislature has already blessed elsewhere in the same chapter.
• If the dispute escalates, remember that Nevada requires the association's internal process and then the NRS 38 alternative-dispute-resolution program before a civil action over the governing documents.

Whether it comes back in 2027

Senator Ohrenschall, who sponsored SB 152, has filed BDR 10-328 for the 84th Session, requested July 31, 2026, with the subject line “Revises provisions relating to homeowners' associations.”² A bill draft request is a subject line, not a text, and nothing published says what it contains. But it is the same senator, on the same chapter, and it is on file.