By Carrie Haderlie
The Sheridan Press
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

SHERIDAN — A new law giving property owners and law enforcement immediate authority to remove illegal occupants – often considered squatters — from residential property will go into effect this summer.

The need for Senate Enrolled Act No. 20, “Residential Property Removal of Unlawful Occupant,” was first highlighted last summer by a rental property owner in Casper, according to Wyoming REALTORS Government Affairs Director Laurie Urbigkit.

“This property owner was notified that her tenant had moved out, and she went by the property to see if it needed to be cleaned or taken care of,” Urbigkit said. “When she unlocked the door, there were three or four people living there that she did not know.”

Those residents claimed that they sub-leased the home from the first tenant, but that tenant did not have the right to sublease, according to Urbigkit.

“They were squatters,” Urbigkit said.

The Casper landlord was not alone; a survey of Realtors across Wyoming revealed similar stories from across the state.

“It is Cheyenne, it is Cody, it happens in rural cabins. It happens to foreclosures,” Urbigkit said. “This really is happening in Wyoming, and in other areas in the U.S., people have even reported (squatters having) false documents to be in a home.”

According to the Mountain States Policy Center, Wyoming’s new law closely resembles a Florida law passed last year increasing penalties for squatters and giving property owners recourse against them. 

Similar efforts are also underway in New York and Texas. 

Most state law does not differentiate between a squatter and tenants who have overstayed their lease, refused to pay rent, or who has potentially violated the lease terms in some other way. Those situations, according to the MSPC, are true landlord-tenant disputes that should be handled in civil courts.

However, squatters “run all kinds of scams to take advantage of laws that are designed to protect tenants from landlord abuse and improper eviction,” according to the MSPC. Those may include seeking out empty vacation homes or properties for sale to live in before being noticed by the property owner.

Wyoming’s new law gives property owners a “well-defined avenue, a spelled-out procedure to get squatters out of their property,” Urbigkit said. 

Beginning July 1, property owners will be able to request law enforcement assistance for immediate removal of unauthorized occupants if those residents meet certain criteria: that they do not have a lease, are not previous tenants and are not related to the owner due to concerns over domestic violence or marital disputes.

“(Currently), when you call law enforcement, if the people living in a property say they have a right to be there, law enforcement in some jurisdictions have been told by their county attorneys that it becomes a civil matter,” Urbigkit said. “That can take a lot of time and money to settle things.”

The new law will instead mean that a property owner or owner’s agent, after signing an affidavit that people in a home are not there legally, can seek immediate action. 

“It is pretty well-defined,” Urbigkit said. “We want to go after the people who are not there legally, and never were there legally.”

Gov. Mark Gordon allowed the enrolled act to go into effect without his signature, citing concerns over adequate due process in a February letter. Gordon wrote that he agreed private property owners should have an “effective, efficient, and fair process for removing unlawful occupants from their residential property.”

“However, my concern lies with the process for immediate removal,” Gordon wrote. “While we can all agree that an unauthorized squatter should not be able to delay removal and potentially damage private property before they are ejected from another’s property through legal process, there still must be sufficient due process to ensure authorized occupants are not inadvertently harmed by errant removal requests.”

Urbigkit noted that the new law went through the interim process, including several periods of public comment.

“Everybody had the opportunity to dig through it and have the wording the way we needed it to,” she said.

Allen Thompson with the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police said that the implementation and enforcement of the new law take place at the local level with input from city and county attorneys across the state.

“After the session, this was one of the bills that we provided notice to all of our members in email and through a virtual meeting that bill had passed, and goes into law July 1,” he said.

Urbigkit said she can understand a sometimes desperate need for housing, but it was not right for owners to have no immediate recourse to reclaim their property.

“Some people may be desperate to find housing, and I don’t doubt that the lack of housing has some impact on this behavior, but it is also a huge scam,” she said. “People have learned how to scam the system.

“Now, law enforcement can actively go with the owner and evict people,” Urbigkit said. “They can stand by while (squatters) get their stuff to the curb.”