A bill to let towns enforce your covenants went to study and died
A bill to let towns enforce your covenants went to study and died
2026-09-15 · New Hampshire · Legislation · Did not pass
The bill is dead. SB 175 (2025), "relative to the use of covenants by municipalities," was rereferred to committee in March 2025, then referred to interim study by the Senate on a 6-0 committee vote and a voice vote on January 7, 2026.1 Interim study does not survive the end of a biennium, and the 169th General Court ended August 19, 2026.
Prime sponsor Sen. Keith Murphy, with Sens. Innis and Pearl. It would have inserted new sections after RSA 674:76 and amended RSA 674:60.
What it would have done, in two opposite directions
It would have let towns enforce private covenants. "Municipalities may adopt ordinances that allow the enforcement of private covenants. These ordinances shall permit municipalities to enforce covenants enacted by past landowners or homeowners' associations, provided such covenants remain valid under current law."
And it would have stopped towns from requiring them. "Municipalities and state government shall be restricted from requiring or encouraging the establishment of covenants as a condition of any zoning or land use approval. Any covenants that are required or encouraged by town officials as a condition of approval shall be considered invalid."
With one carve-out preserved: "This subdivision does not affect the authority granted to municipalities under RSA 674:60 to require restrictive covenants for workforce housing developments."
Why the first half would have been a significant change
Covenant enforcement in New Hampshire is private law. An association, or an owner with standing, sues in superior court. The town is not a party and has no role.
That allocation is why enforcement is expensive and why so much of it does not happen. A small association facing a covenant violation weighs the cost of litigation against the harm, and frequently does nothing — which over time erodes the covenant through non-enforcement.
Municipal enforcement would have changed the economics entirely. A town enforcing a covenant uses the code-enforcement apparatus it already runs, at no cost to the association.
It would also have created problems the bill's text does not obviously solve. A municipality enforcing a private covenant is enforcing a contract it is not party to, against a person who did not agree with the town. Which covenants a town would choose to enforce, on whose complaint, with what appeal route, and how a town would resolve a covenant whose meaning is genuinely disputed — none of that is in the two sentences above.
Why the second half matters more than it looks
The prohibition on requiring covenants as a condition of approval, with the sanction that such covenants "shall be considered invalid," reaches a real New Hampshire practice.
Planning boards routinely secure ongoing obligations by conditioning approval on a recorded covenant — maintenance of stormwater infrastructure, preservation of open space, restrictions on further subdivision, obligations to maintain a private road. Those covenants are then the association's, and the association inherits the duty.
Invalidating covenants imposed that way would have been retroactive in effect on a great many New Hampshire subdivisions, and it is a plausible reason the bill did not move. An association whose stormwater maintenance covenant was a planning-board condition would have had the obligation voided — and, along with it, the only instrument allocating the cost among owners.
What a New Hampshire association is left with
Enforcement in court, under the declaration, at its own expense. That has not changed and there is no proposal to change it.
The practical mitigations are the unglamorous ones. Enforce consistently, because inconsistent enforcement is the defence an owner raises. Document what was enforced and when. Use the fee-shifting provision in the declaration if there is one, and understand that if there is not, the association is paying for enforcement out of common funds that the violating owner also contributes to.
And where a covenant originated as a planning-board condition, keep the approval file. It establishes why the obligation exists and who it was meant to bind, which matters when a successor owner argues the covenant is a dead letter.
The wider 2026 pattern
SB 175 is one of a run of New Hampshire proposals that would have reallocated authority between towns, developers and private communities, and almost none of them survived.
HB 1619, on property-owner rights and limitations on municipal land use regulation, went to interim study on March 11, 2026. HB 1251, restricting municipal downzoning inconsistent with existing neighbourhood density, went to interim study the same day. HB 1011, which would have repealed RSA 674:16, VIII and with it municipal occupancy restrictions based on household composition or bedroom count, was killed by voice vote on February 5, 2026. HB 1017, which would have let municipalities require a recorded restrictive covenant to enforce workforce-housing status on an accessory dwelling unit, died without a floor vote.
The legislature declined, repeatedly, to move the line. New Hampshire's allocation stands where it was: towns regulate land use, associations enforce covenants, and neither does the other's job.
What to watch next
Nothing on the 2027 House legislative service request list as filed revives this. Two adjacent requests exist — LSR 2027-0089 on planning board authority over subdivision applications and LSR 2027-0095 on zoning board of adjustment public notice — both titles without text.
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