The scope, and why townhouses are expressly in it

The act does not reach every building permit. An “application” is a residential building permit application for a dwelling of not more than three stories above grade plane, with no accessory structure above three stories, and not more than 3,000 square feet of finished floor area per dwelling unit or townhouse unit, regulated under the local government’s adopted version of the International Residential Code. A “dwelling” is a building containing one or two dwelling units.

It applies only to counties zoning under W.S. § 18-5-201 and cities or towns zoning under W.S. § 15-1-601 that have adopted a version of the IRC. Wyoming counties and municipalities vary in whether they have done so, so coverage is not statewide by default.

The naming of the townhouse unit is what brings the act inside common-interest housing. A townhouse under 3,000 square feet of finished floor area, in a two-unit building of three stories or fewer, is within the definition — which covers a large share of the attached housing Wyoming actually builds.

What it does not do

This is the point most likely to be misread, so it is worth stating flatly. The act runs against a “local government entity.” It creates:

• No deadline for an architectural review committee. A Wyoming association’s review timetable comes from its declaration and design guidelines, and from nowhere else.
• No deemed approval under a declaration. Where a Wyoming community has an automatic-approval-by-silence clause, that clause is a term of the recorded covenants. The Wyoming Supreme Court treated exactly such a clause as covenant text, not statute, in Conger v. AVR Homeowner’s Association, Inc., 2025 WY 91.
• No preemption of a recorded declaration. Nothing in chapter 42 limits what a covenant may require, and a county permit has never overridden a covenant in Wyoming — the Supreme Court said so again in Schroth v. Kirk, 2025 WY 24, ¶ 31: “Although Teton County may have authorized some of these activities, that approval does not override or excuse a violation of the Covenants.”

The practical effect inside a covenanted subdivision is that the two approval tracks now run at different speeds. The public one has an outer bound of roughly forty days and a deemed-approval default. The private one has whatever the declaration says, which in most Wyoming communities is a committee timetable with no statutory floor under it.

A bill that failed, then passed

The identical idea was HB0202 in the 2025 General Session, and it died in Senate committee on March 3, 2025. The same measure became law in the 2026 Budget Session — a session in which a non-budget bill needs a two-thirds vote merely to be introduced, and in which 59 House bills and 32 Senate files failed introduction outright.

Where it sits among Wyoming’s housing measures

HB0002 was the one housing-supply bill that made it through in 2026. The others did not:

• SF0064, “Investment in Wyoming housing,” a $30 million revolving loan fund administered by the Wyoming Community Development Authority — failed introduction 15–15, a literal tie against a 21-vote threshold.
• SF0089, narrowing the public-property tax exemption for public-private affordable housing partnerships — failed introduction 18–13.
• HB0183, “Renters’ property tax relief” — not considered for introduction.

No 2026 interim committee has a housing or zoning topic on its approved list, so the next attempt at any of these would come from an individual member in the 2027 General Session rather than from a committee bill.