The Sheridan City Council held a study session on Monday, January 12, 2026, starting at 5:30 PM. Six items were discussed: a housing land trust grant sponsorship request, three liquor license matters, a major PUD amendment for the Teal Springs subdivision, and general council business. No formal votes were taken; these items are scheduled for action at future council meetings.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the January 12, 2026 uh study session. We're starting at 5 30. There's six items on the agenda for tonight. So we'll just get rolling. Our first one is item number one discussion of Sheridan County Housing Land Trust request for city support for the Wyoming Unmet Housing Needs Grant. And with us tonight is Christine Dietrich, executive director of Habitat for Humanities. Welcome, Christine. Thank you. Good evening. I also have Johnny Law and Meredith Saca with me, the rest of our team to just try to help answer any questions that you may have about what this application looks like or the project that we are seeking funding for. But real quickly before I try to navigate the slides up here, I know the question's been asked for an update on where we're at with the letter of support that the city gave for Weston Village for the exemption request. Those letters were submitted. A second interview was held, received very positively, so we do expect a positive outcome. They did ask for a second letter showing that we meet the IRS guidelines for for housing, and that has been secured and submitted. So it's pending legal review, and then I actually fly out tomorrow to meet with them in person. So hoping to have an actual answer by the end of the week. We'll see how the trip goes. But tonight is for something different. The question gets asked all the time about where our next project is, and this opportunity is going to come and go pretty quickly for this unmet housing needs grant. So in 2023, it actually was appropriated $5 million from the general fund. The legislator did that. And initially it was restricted for infrastructure, but in 2024 was amended to include land acquisition. So the challenge that we have and why we didn't ask for the city support to apply previously, is you have to have the land before you can install the infrastructure. So we're excited at this opportunity to purchase land with these funds and have the city sponsor an application. The funds do have to be encumbered by June 30th of 2026. The actual grant is due the end of this month. So it is a very, very quick turnaround. So we are requesting that the City of Sheridan sponsor this application to submit an application on behalf of the land trust for 1.6 million. So how this process works and the reason why we're asking you to sponsor is that us as a nonprofit cannot apply directly for these funds. Cities, towns, counties, tribal governments may apply, and the city of Sheridan would submit an application on our behalf. SLIB would issue these funds to the city on a reimbursement basis for the approved expenses, which would be outlined in the application. And then again, the funding must be encumbered by June 30th. Applications will be reviewed the first week of February, and then recommendations given to SLIP for review, and we would assume then final awards at the April 2nd SLIB meeting. We have a lot of really good documents ready to support that application already. So and we already have a project or a piece of land identified. So we're looking at vendor lane and vendor west subdivision. It's a 1.6 million dollar land purchase. The first lot is zoned R3. It has a potential for seven fourplexes. And then the back lot is zoned M1. Um, a minimum of 30 single family lots is what the discussion was with the current land uh owner. But we can do high density, so we would explore the possibility possibility to do 30 plus units. So we'll look at how we can max out the density there and minimum serve 58 households, which is almost twice as much as the Weston Village subdivision. So if you can see this here, or if you have copy of slides, you can kind of see the rough outline here. Uh that front half is where those seven fourplexes would go, and that back half there is where the 30 single family at minimum could go. We do have this plat was given to us as part of the documents from the landowner, but this plat is expired, so we would have to redo that plat, but this kind of shows you the rough sketch of what it would have looked like with those seven lots on the front side for those fourplexes. There has been a lot of legwork already done by the current landowner. We have a whole list of documents that he's provided to us, including the soils report, a parking report, a traffic study, the expired plat, so we have something to go off of flood insurance study, and then our team has already identified additional funding sources which would move the project forward after you were able to purchase the land. So we feel like this is a really solid project and a really solid land purchase that would just continue just the success that we've seen in Weston Village with serving our workforce. So again, just a recap we would ask that the city of Sheridan sponsor an application on our behalf for this unspent housing needs fund application in the amount of 1.6 million dollars for land acquisition.