ARE YOU READY FOR THIS? BECAUSE HERE IT COMES!

I’ve finally worked my way through the land use/housing bills that passed in the 2025 legislative session, and it’s time to work up my summaries of what planners have to do now.  Be forewarned, there’s a lot!  The last couple of years, I was rather astounded with how much we were adding to the LUDMA in each session, and what that would mean for planners to keep up with.  Those last couple of sessions where I counted it up, there was something on the order of 400 lines of code being added to the LUDMA each year.

This year, guess what?  It turns out to be 765 lines!  And not only that, as I went over the bills, a number of them were adding land use provisions to other titles in the state code as well – by my count, six other state code titles, such as State Construction and Fire Code, the Utah Energy Act, Veterans and Military Affairs, Housing and Community Development Division, and the Water Quality Act (there are more).  What this means is, if you want to cover the waterfront and make sure you are in compliance with all that is required in state code for local land use planning and administration, planners not only have a huge LUDMA to wade through, but they must be aware of several other provisions in other titles of the state code.  Craig Call suggested that this would be a good project for the ULUI Land Use Library, to get all this written up in one place.  I think it will be needed.

And now a pet peeve – trying to make sense of some of the sections of LUDMA.  This can require quite an effort.  Here’s a provision from a bill passed this year – while I haven’t included the sections in the code it is referring to, just take a look at how it’s written and how much back-and-forthing you have to do to get it:

“a recommendation to implement five or more of the moderate income housing strategies described in Subsection (2)(b)(iii), of which one shall be the moderate income housing strategy described in Subsection (2)(b)(iii)(W),(2)(b)(iii)(U) and one shall be a moderate income housing strategy described in Subsection (2)(b)(iii)(G), or (H), or (Q); or (II)a recommendation to implement the moderate income housing strategy described in Subsection (2)(b)(iii)(U), one of the moderate income housing strategies described in Subsections (2)(b)(iii)(X) through (CC), and one moderate income housing strategy described in Subsection (2)(b)(iii)”

Got that?  I’ve been joking with some planners that to understand what the state code now requires will take having someone like a Talmud scholar to study and interpret what you need to do to be in compliance. (I exaggerate for effect, but maybe not by much!)

To help in understanding what happened legislatively, and maybe get some of your questions answered, there will be several live and online legislative update sessions coming up:

Okay, there is just too much detail to get into all of what was in the bills passed this session, but I think I will give you some highlights here, and at least tell you where you can find more details of what’s changed.

Let’s start with a new requirement for adding to the general plan.  By July 1, 2027, all cities within a Metropolitan Planning Organization (Wasatch Front, Mountainlands, Cache MPO, and Dixie MPO) must update the transportation and circulation element of their general plans “to identify priority connections to remedy physical impediments, including water conveyances, that would improve circulation and enhance vehicle, transit, bicycle, or pedestrian access to significant economic, educational, recreational, and other priority destinations.”  Now, here’s something new that hasn’t been required to be included in general plans before, the connection priorities so identified in the plan must also include “cost estimates, potential funding sources, including state, local, federal, and private funding, and impediments to constructing the connections.”  The MPOs are then required to report back to the Transportation legislative interim committee the status of these plan updates in November of 2025, 2026 and 2027.  The MPOs are also required to undertake a regional roadway grid network study,  The  frustrating part of all this for me is that these requirements are not placed in the LUDMA – instead, they are in Title 10-8 – Powers and Duties of Municipalities.  Thus, this requirement does not apply to counties.  Okay, that’s part of one bill (SB195).

Changes were made (again!) to the provisions for the Moderate Income Housing Plans (MIHP), which is also part of the community general plan.  First, though, it needs to be understood that another moderate income housing option was added to LUDMA, which is something called “affordable home ownership density bonus, for single-family units, and for multi-family units.”  Basically what these new sections in LUDMA say is, if a jurisdiction allows for an increase in density as a bonus in certain zones, and if the community also imposes certain restrictions on owner-occupancy, income qualifications, dwelling size, and other factors, then by implementing such a bonus density, the jurisdiction will meet the MIHP requirements for implementing housing affordability.  The language in this bill (HB37) also stipulates that by implementing any of the other housing affordability programs put into state code in the last couple of years (FHIZ, HOPZ, HTRZ), the requirements of the MIHP are also met for a period of years, and reporting is modified.  Read the bill to get the details, but be forewarned, that clip I displayed near the beginning of this posting to show how confusing LUDMA is getting, is from this bill.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  There’s still plenty of interesting provisions to come (and plenty of work for local planners to do to achieve compliance!), which we’ll feature during this week.