The Wyoming House passed this session's only remaining affordable housing bill on Feb. 18. But lawmakers who once supported the bill say it was altered so significantly that it now hurts affordable housing efforts.
Senate File 40 would make it harder for neighbors to stop a development on the land next to their property. But a late-stage amendment added another provision making it illegal for cities or towns to impose development fees to support affordable housing — as Teton County does.
Freedom Caucus Rep. John Bear of (R-Gillette) said local governments should be reined in.
"We are taking from property owners and saying, 'We have a problem in our community, and you're going to help us fix it,'" Bear said.
Opponents said this amendment ruined the bill. They tried to kill it, first by arguing the addition was not "germane" to the original bill, then by arguing it on the merits.
According to the rules followed by the House, amendments may contradict the "spirit" of a bill, but they are required to address the same topic the bill does. Opponents argued Bear's amendment was too far afield of the bill's original scope, while Bear and others argued the bill says it is "an act relating to cities and towns" — and the amendment relates to cities and towns, too.
This argument prevailed and Bear and his allies won the vote on "germaneness." So opponents attacked the amendment on its merits instead.
Rep. Mike Yin (D-Jackson) said the amendment flew in the face of the bill's original intent.
"I want to pass the bill," he said on the House floor. "I don't want to muddy it. This would muddy it a lot. We could help housing with this bill, but this amendment actually hurts developers and hurts housing."
Opponents also raised concerns about process. They said the amendment should be brought as its own bill, which would require it to survive committee hearings and three readings in both chambers.
After roughly an hour of debate, the amendment passed. It led nine House members, including most House Democrats, to vote against it.
On the bill's second reading, Yin tried to add language from another pro-housing bill that died earlier this session. The goal behind that dead bill, and Yin's amendment, was to expand a complex financial tool called tax increment financing, or TIF.
TIF allows a city or town to fund infrastructure upgrades to support a new development by borrowing from the future property tax revenue that new development will bring. TIF can already be used for "blighted" areas of a city, but for economic and political reasons, local governments are hesitant about labeling areas "blighted." The dead TIF bill — and Yin's amendment to SF40 mirroring it — explicitly allows the use of TIF for affordable housing without requiring a "blight" designation.
Most housing advocates want to use TIF to support affordable housing. It's one of the key recommendations highlighted by the Wyoming Community Development Authority's recent statewide housing report.
The TIF bill died without a hearing when the House Corporations Committee ran out of time to hear it before the deadline to do so.
"We had everyone agree that this is a good tool that we could use in our toolbox," Yin said to his fellow lawmakers. "It just didn't end up seeing the light of day within our time frame in committee. But the tool is definitely one where we could use it to build housing in communities like the one that we're in today."
Yin's amendment to resurrect the TIF bill by inserting it into the last remaining housing bill ultimately failed.
On the bill's third and final reading, it passed with a vote of 51-9. Yin, most Democrats and a few Republicans voted against it, citing the earlier amendment pushed by Bear as a reason to scrap the entire proposal.
The Senate did not immediately accept the House's additions.
Sen. Tara Nethercott (R-Cheyenne) said members of her chamber should "stand together" to resist the "serious irregularity" of Bear's late-stage amendment.
"The process wasn't followed," Nethercott said on the Senate floor.
The chamber voted 1-30 against "concurring" with the House's amendments.
Had that vote gone the other way, the bill would be headed to the governor for his signature or veto. Instead, it will now go to a "conference" committee tasked with working out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. They'll have to come up with a unified bill by the first week of March if it's going to survive.
"This is a way to correct it," Nethercott said. "This is a way to go back, for the House and the Senate to come together, to discuss those issues and bring it back for the Senate's consideration."
