The city of Overland Park is lending its voice to an effort aimed at limiting homeowners associations’ power to ban residential solar panels.
As part of its annual state legislative platform, the city is supporting state law changes that would remove HOAs’ ability to ban solar panels on homes within their jurisdictions. Instead, HOAs would be able to have rules governing things like their appearance, location and installation, but could not prohibit them outright.
The city added a line about solar panels to its existing sustainability and conservation section in the multipage document that covers a variety of issues, ranging from maintaining local control to support for Medicaid expansion. (The annual state legislative platform is a guiding document of sorts that lobbyists for the city use to advocate for the city during the Kansas legislative session.)
During a Committee of the Whole and in a subsequent meeting in mid-December, the Overland Park City Council unanimously approved the platform with the solar panel amendment.
Overland Park has incentivized residential solar
Back in September, the Overland Park Environmental Advisory Council drafted a letter to the Overland Park City Council Community Development Committee urging them to add new language to the state legislative platform for 2026 pertaining to solar panels.
Specifically, in the letter signed by Chair Cassandra Ford, the advisory council requested the city add a line saying: “The City supports legislation that limits the ability of homeowner associations to restrict residential solar panels.”
The committee supported the idea, voting 6-0 in favor of adding the language or something similar to the platform.
Previously, Overland Park has taken steps to encourage more homeowners to take advantage of rooftop solar panels, in part by reducing the permitting fees associated with developing new, solar-ready homes and installing solar panels on existing homes. However, few homeowners and developers have taken advantage and installed them on new homes, according to the city.
At the same time, more than 150 homeowners have taken advantage of programs that incentivize solar panel installation on existing homes, typically in older neighborhoods without HOAs or with HOAs that are less strict on the matter.
HOAs might be a barrier to residential solar projects
The advisory council determined that a barrier to utilizing the solar incentive programs is not a lack of demand, but that several new homes are in homeowners associations that ban solar panels outright, said Bill Madsen, a member of the advisory council, told the Community Development Committee in December.
That prompted the group — tasked generally with studying and advising the city council on environmental issues and suggesting action to address them — to recommend supporting a change in state law.
The language that the city council ultimately approved reads: “[t]he City supports legislation that limits the ability of homeowner associations to ban or restrict reasonable use of residential solar panels.”
HOAs would still be able to regulate solar panels
Lara Isch, sustainability manager for the city, estimated that about 40% of homes, duplexes and other housing types in Overland Park are in some kind of HOA. Many of those are formed with several rules, including solar panel bans, baked in at the time a neighborhood is established. That means that even if there’s broad support for solar panels in a neighborhood, building them is impossible without changing bylaws, which can be an arduous task.
But the city isn’t arguing for a free-for-all either. Isch said HOAs would still be able to set rules related to residential solar panels.
“They’ll still have some level of control over how they go in, where they go in, what they will allow, but they can’t keep people from putting solar panels on their house if that’s the energy choice that they have,” she told the Committee of the Whole on Dec. 15.
Councilmember Chris Newlin, at the Community Development Committee in early December, noted that HOA rules in his neighborhood had stopped him from installing solar panels at his home in southern Overland Park more than a decade ago.
“This is a problem,” he said of the solar panel bans. “[Having residential panels] would be an easy investment that would save people a lot of money.”
Councilmember Amy Antrim shared a similar story at the same committee meeting. Her HOA had tried to remove restrictions on solar and wind energy in its jurisdiction, but the bylaw amendment process proved too complex, and the effort failed despite support.
There’s been some movement on residential solar at KS Leg
- Draft legislation to keep HOAs from banning solar panels has appeared in both chambers of the Kansas Legislature during previous state legislative sessions, Isch said.
- The last time something similar came up, it stalled at the committee level.
- That doesn’t mean the issue is dead in the water. It could reemerge in the forthcoming session or in subsequent years.
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